Review of Why Are We in Vietnam?
Eugene Glenn's enthusiastic Village Voice review of Why Are We in Vietnam? (28 September 1967), calling it 'a triumph' and Mailer 'our finest novelist and essayist,' and reading the novel as a Manichean inquiry into the nature of God. Full text held (rights pending).
Read an excerpt (rights pending)
Eugene Glenn. Review of Why Are We in Vietnam?. The Village Voice, 28 September 1967, pp. 6–7, 41.
The most enthusiastic of the major reviews: Glenn calls the novel “a triumph, powerful, original, brilliant in substance and in formal means,” reads it as the realization of what An American Dream attempted, and argues that beneath the bear-hunt allegory “it is the nature of God that Mailer is after” — a Manichean vision in which “existence changes essence.” He ranks Mailer “our finest novelist and essayist.” Full text on the full-text page (rights pending).