The Deer Park: A Novel

Norman Mailer, in the early 1950s, is on the comeback trail. After his critically embraced The Naked and the Dead he stumbled bad, in critics' eyes, with The Barbary Shore. Our boy, insecure and talented, macho and ambitious, wrote The Deer Park to resurrect his reputation. His publisher wouldn't publish it and so he shopped it around and published the book, a story, part román a clef part his own fantastic universe, tells the story of a writer who comes to Hollywood [see F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel West, Bud Schulberg] and rises and falls in a corrupt and beguiling cesspool. The writing is often uneven, the characters cut-out, but behind our struggling young artist is a muse still busting out to be heard. He occasionally soars. And he went on with mature works -essay, journalism and fiction- would after this justify his talent and insure that Norman would swagger and stagger with sure feet through the artistic firmament of the second half of the 20th century.

My first Mailer novel. His reputation as a misogynist preceded him, but given the time and place of this novel it didn't detract for me. I sense his portrait of Hollywood celebrity and the malaise and "sin" of the idle partiers at Desert D'or is nearly biography or even autobiography. I will research a bit.He writes very well, but the pacing of this nearly entirely interior novel was a chore at times, a bit of a slog. However, there were pieces along the way like shells on a sparse beach that felt like treasure and kept me going. The final 10% was pretty snappy and interesting and made the journey feel worthy. But without the sense of wonder or enthralling entanglement I have to cap review at three stars.

This is my first Norman Mailer novel and probably my last. Style and prose are interesting but the first precondition of a fictional novel in my eyes is that it takes the reader on an interesting journey, and the Deer Park misses the mark on this fundamental requirement. The plot takes forever to move forward, none of the characters are particularly interesting or for that matter likeable, and it is all so humdrum. Maybe when first published it was supposed to be shocking and maybe the attraction at the time was that it did shock. Today however none of the bedhopping or narcissistic musing shock at all and if not exactly commonplace have been done to death.

Before reading, I just assumed, "Oh, a Norman Mailer novel, I'll love it". Not the case. I'm sure the characters are thinly veiled references to real life Hollywood types of the 50s and 60s, but unless you could make the connections, the novel, for me, just doesn't work.

Mailer’s third novel is billed by some as the best book ever written about Hollywood. Perhaps, but the seemingly endless rotation of characters from bed to bed, with tortured navel-gazing about their fickle emotions came to be tiresome. A curiosity at best.

Don't look for a Hollywood expose' but Mailer's take on that atmosphere of pretense mixed with real life and real emotions set in a Desert suburb of a fictional LA called "The Capital. There are a few endearing characters that will stay with you for a long time.

Too slow. Every scene was dragged out to eternity and went flat. Didn't have the Mailer "punch"!

No satisfactory ending to a long story.

A well known book always a good read.

Fantastic novel which should without a doubt be more widely recognised as one of the classics.

Sur fond de Maccarthysme une histoire de starlettes avant le "metoo". Dans le désert celles qui ont réussi, celles qui veulent reussir et celles qui savent qu'elles ne reussiront pas...

Ordered for new copy but the copy received is very old with yellowed and spotted pages.

Sergius is a loser. Mailer makes his narrator a loser for reasons I cannot fathom, and makes him a little less convincing than he could have been. What turned a disciplined Air Force pilot into a drifter, floating from one shallow experience to another? Though Sergius's drifting is psychological - what does he want to do now he's out of the military? Writing seems to be the main focus, but he spends more time getting drunk and hanging out with call girls, pimps, washed-up movie stars and black-listed directors, never fitting into the society he has gate-crashed, but somehow finds himself accepted. He buddies up in the bedroom and the bar, and slowly loses the few thousand dollars he has in the bank.Mailer is asking us about the point of patriotism, I think. "Patriotism is for pigs" says a director on the black list, and "Patriots feel strongly and think weakly" notes the narrator. What better example of patriotism can be found than a military serviceman? They are Patriotism personified. So, what does a grateful country offer one of its loyal servants when their time in uniform is up? Mailer gives us the answer: nothing.It happens that Sergius drifts into a world of debauchery and indulgence, but this is just as empty a world in terms of its moral backbone as the gutter and back-alley scraps between hobos and junkies. Mailer gives his protagonist a well-tailored, sexually promiscuous, boozed-up abyss with no meaning or pay off for his dedication to the flag. It makes for a warmer poverty than can be found on the streets, but poverty it is.Mailer was far too intelligent to be a patriot, and that is what vibrates at the heart of this book: serving your country is for nought. It is a wasteland that awaits you afterwards, and that wasteland comes in many distracting disguises.