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

</blockquote> I mean, listen. It would be great to proclaim that we were drawn in by the sex scenes.</blockquote> The only thing is, until ''An American Dream'', Mailer wouldn’t get a shake of the hand from the dedicated literary onanist. Maybe ''The Time of Her Time''.A bit of The Deer Park. But, hey, we’d already read Terry Southern’s Candy. We’d scampered into ''Lady Chatterley’s Lover'' and ’64 was the year of the court fight over Henry Miller’s ''Tropic of Cancer'', a book that showed up,{{pg| 414#|415#}} literally in brown paper wrappers, in the school hall from time to time. We were veterans of post-war war novels. ''Battle Cry'' by Leon Uris with the bedroom wrestling that always ended in “. . .” and at least two of us were collectors of the fantastic and now much-mourned Monarch Books, a long gone and sadly missed paperback company that had dissected the soul of the thirteen-year-old boy. Titles like: Bloody Beaches (Marines die hard!), ''Baby Face Nelson, Reptilicus, Tarawa, Marine War Heroes'', ''The Indian Wars series'', ''Nikki'' (One night with Nikki was like a lifetime)—the company put out a forest’s worth of original paperbacks that skipped their way into the welcoming thirteen-year-old mind. And in each book, even the historical ''The Apache Indian Wars'' (even in the novelization of the monster movie Reptilicus, f’Christ’s-sake!), there was always a surprise sex scene. You’d be sitting around, reading about the Apaches or the Marines or a primordial monster, and suddenly there’d be a breathless unhooking of bras, there’d be nipples, panting and moaning and then the final ellipsis or white space. You stumbled upon these surprises in your reading when you least expected it, although, after some experience, you knew it would be there like a gift in a Cracker Jack's box. Apropos of nothing. Just apropos of they know their audience. Monarch Books was young adult reading at its best. We practically supported the company with purchases from the swiveling metal rack at Virginia Variety and an occasional secretive mail order. And the only reason to go on about all this is . . . into this reading world we invited Norman

   </blockquote> Because, OK, Mad and comics and these books . . . they were all great, and we knew a good piece of junk when we read it. But we were positive that there was something else out there, too, good and tasty, and it wasn’t ''To Kill A Mockingbird''. We’d read some John Steinbeck, Stephen Crane, Jack London, Mickey Spillane. I remember reading Harold Robbins at one point; I

think we were twelve. We’d gone through what we could find of Hammett, Chandler, and Vonnegut. At least it's part of ''Heller’s Catch'' 22. However, nobody could match Mailer for the real lowdown. Mailer was the real thing. In