The Naked and the Dead on the Best Reads list of 2023? Isn’t it…? Didn’t it…?
O.K. Yes. It came out in 1948, which makes it…ancient. But when Library of America put out a new edition this year with letters written during the novel’s formation I decided to take the leap into Norman Mailer.
What did I know about Mailer? Well, I knew he liked to write long books, could be insufferable and borderline lethal as a spouse, and he absolutely chewed up the scenery wherever he appeared.
What I discovered in reading this fictional account of US soldiers conducting an extended campaign against Japanese troops on a remote Pacific island was that Mailer was also an energetic and ambitious writer who could move a story along.
Mailer’s own military service in the Philippines informed his writing, something that becomes abundantly clear in the letters back to his first wife, Beatrice. Even as he is going out on sorties he is constructing the novel in his head and spooling it out to Beatrice in his letters home.
The resulting narrative has a good mix of mythic elements, epic journey motifs, and grunt-level squalor. The ongoing conflicts among soldiers and officers drawn from throughout the US give us an American story with warts and all. It was affecting and memorable and The Naked and the Dead makes the list at #8.
In case you missed the earlier entries on this list:
Heartlands 
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