A very big best seller in the day. A pretty good report of WWII, Pacific Island fighting . Mailer uses a very small set of characters to explain the effect the war had on him in his combat tour. The language was racy for the time. ( )

(49) A verbose 700pg doorstop of a book about the Pacific theater, in particular, one platoon of soldiers trying to capture a little island in the Pacific from the Japanese. We get to know many of the enlisted men and officers fairly well with snippets called "time capsules" about many of the men's lives before the war. Emphasize 'men.' There are essentially zero female characters and the tone is often uncomfortably misogynistic. It took me quite sometime to really get into the book and to keep all the characters straight. In the end, I only really identified with Lieutenant Hearn and the rest all blended together. Finally when the recon platoon was on patrol on the other side of the island the narrative was gripping - but at this point I think we were already over 500pgs in. Do they win the campaign? Whose number will be up? How will the characters we have come to know (and, umm, not love) conduct themselves when the pressure is on?

I did enjoy this novel, but found it quite uneven and rambling at times. And while I didn't necessarily want a Hollywood ending, for all the voluminous pages - it felt unfinished. The contextual detail at times was amazing. Oh that trek with Wilson on the makeshift stretcher - I felt tortured! And Martinez's night dash behind the Japanese lines and the following days nefarious escapades. Hearn! I did empathize with him. I felt itchy and hot and my bowels clench with every page turn. But I found the abrupt biographical sketches of the individual men to be distracting and filled with minutia that honestly didn't help me distinguish character. All the enlisted men were a brand of uneducated disappointed underachievers that I struggled to tell apart. Too much introspective similar musings from each character sketch. Who has the clap? Who is a hobo? Who has a cheating wife? Who thinks all women are whores? They certainly all seem to hate women, hate their hometown, and hate their parents - that's for 'fugging' sure.

Anyway, I read a forward by the author who points out that it was written when he was quite young and even he thinks it was self-indulgent. Agree, but a worthy read. I don't think the best WW2 book ever written. Not sure what is, though. Most memorable for me would be 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North' and 'Band of Brothers' . Glad I read, but glad to be done. ( )

There was a time in my teens when I read many WWII novels. This was one of them. ( )

4/26/22

Clichéd writing, clichéd characters. Manly men, objectified women. I guess it was brilliant for the time but it clearly hasn’t aged well ( )