The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/On Reading Mailer Too Young: Difference between revisions

← Older edit Newer edit →

@@ Line 3: / Line 3: @@
 {{MR04}} <!-- EDIT BELOW THIS LINE -->
 {{Byline|last=Klavan|first=Ross|abstract= Remediating Article by Ross Klvan |note=}}
+ THERE HE IS, GET A GOOD LOOK AT HIM AND PROMISE NOT TO LAUGH—this little guy stooped there Quasimodo-style over a thick book at the lumbering,
+dark wood table in the cathedral library of this suburban New York junior
+high. Dust on his socks. A morsel of cafeteria lunch pasted on his lip. Girls
+in bare legs who’ve just learned to have breasts walk by, but he won’t look up
+because he’s afraid his hormones will make him detonate, and, well, it’s a
+good book. Here it is already 1964. He’s thirteen. Kennedy’s just dead, the
+Beatles are just arrived, the Stones are releasing their debut album, too, Clay
+has just become Ali and the GI’s in Vietnam are still called advisors, mostly.
+The red carpet’s getting ready to unfold. And this little guy is sitting there
+reading The Naked and the Dead.
+ The Holt, Rinehart, Winston edition. Black dust jacket that sports a red
+line drawing—all dots and jagged lines—the face of (maybe) a soldier in
+some tight-lipped, abstract rendering of the thousand-mile stare. This kid
+reads on, about Croft and Wilson and the climb up Mount Anaka. And we
+could say that he hits page 602, runs into the fabled white space, and then the
+shock of the pick-up: “A half hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a
+machine gun bullet which passed through his chest.” And we could go
+through the usual amazement, the heartbreak of losing Hearn after six
+hundred-odd pages and the later dismissals from Mailer himself who sort of
+scoffed at this device as one he pulled from E. M. Forster. We could do that
+but . . . .
+ OK. But it’s not Hearn, and it’s not Forester; in fact, it’s not literature that’s got this little thirteen-year-old guy pouring through Mailer too young, going page-by-page through the longest book he’s ever read. No, the clincher is
+earlier. It’s page 150. It’s when Mailer’s recon platoon suddenly comes under Japanese machine gun fire and we read: “BEE-YOWWWW! . . . BEEYOOWWWW!” and on and on and on.