By Eugene Glenn. The Village Voice, 28 September 1967, pp. 6–7, 41.
Flatly and simply, Mailer’s new novel is a triumph, powerful, original, brilliant in substance and in formal means. The war is never mentioned, the question of the title answered only obliquely by an allegory in naturalistic guise of Texans on a bear hunt in Alaska. D. J., the 18-year-old narrator, “suffers from one great American virtue or maybe it is a disease—he sees right through shit,” surely the essential qualification for performing an autopsy on the American scene. As D. J. examines Dallas, that is, most of us, the novel examines D. J., that is, the rest of us. The mood is despairing, the criteria moral, the underlying preoccupations theological. Mailer repudiates the political, the historical, the sociological, to view Vietnam purely as an action resulting from moral disease. Presumably he castigates us so that we may reform; he not only has little hope that we will, he seems, in an underlying trend contradictory to the novel’s surface, to deny the philosophical possibility of any good. Vietnam provides Mailer the occasion for developing further the concerns of “An American Dream” and “Cannibals and Christians.” The novel would stand the work it is if there were not one American soldier in Asia. It is the nature of God that Mailer is after.