In Norman Mailer’s ”Naked and the Dead,” arguably the greatest combat novel ever written by an American, the reader engages with Lieut. Robert Hearn through hundreds of pages, getting to know all his real and psychological limnings, before coming to this sentence: ”A half-hour later, Lieutenant Hearn was killed by a machine-gun bullet which passed through his chest.”
In Stephen Spielberg’s ”Saving Private Ryan,” arguably the best combat movie ever made by an American, there is the same brutal, sudden, absurd death — but in this case concentrated carnage — that is, the chaos and reality of combat. Can a novel, no matter how magnificent, ever have the visceral impact of a greatly made movie? Will novelists try after this movie’s popularity?