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

  THERE HE IS, GET A GOOD LOOK AT HIM AND PROMISE NOT TO LAUGH—this little guy stooping there Quasimodo-style over a thick book at the lumbering dark wood table in the cathedral library of this suburban New York junior high. With dust on his socks, a morsel of cafeteria lunch stuck on his lip. Girls with bare legs who’ve just started developing, but he won't look up, afraid that his hormones might cause him to explode, but he’s lost in the book; it's just too good. Here, it is already 1964. He’s thirteen. Kennedy has just died, the Beatles have just arrived, and the Stones are releasing their debut album, too. Clay has just become Ali, and the GI’s in Vietnam are still mostly called advisors. The red carpet’s getting ready to unfold. And this little guy is sitting there, reading The Naked and the Dead. Holt, Rinehart, Winston edition. A 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 continues reading about Croft and Wilson and the climb up Mount Anaka. And we could say that he hits page, runs into the fabled white space, and then the shock of the pick-up: “half an 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. It’s not Forster. It’s not literature that’s got this little thirteen-year-old guy reading Mailer too young, turning page-by-page through the longest book he’s ever read. No, the clincher comes earlier — it’s on page 150. It’s when Mailer’s recon platoon suddenly comes under