Don’t ask me what I was thinking, but I could have sworn “The Naked and the Dead” was a noir detective novel. Whoops. Wrong. I open up the pages and find myself on a Pacific Island in the middle of the war with Japan. So, I think to myself, here comes the war novel – hang on for the battle. Nope, wrong again.

Instead, what I found was a story about tedium and boredom interspersed with rare moments of panic. Real war. Eventually, the story turns and becomes one of men sent on a senseless recon. In other words, an anti-war novel. It does its job well.

A few battles stories are told, and there is the story of men responding to unquestioned authority. But this is not a story that focuses on those aspects. Rather, it focuses on the stories that are the men that populate this tale; men – most of them not particularly nice – thrown together by a cataclysmic event. And, as such, the book is a reminder that heroic war stories are much more fiction than we want to admit. The story of a band of brothers who bond is turned on its ear in this book. Instead, the men pull together, but only when they really have to. And there is no love lost, only the false camaraderie that comes from experiencing hell and stupidity together. They work together, they survive together, they buddy together, but they still do not like each other

At times, the tedium of the book becomes wearying and, while the characters are vividly drawn (the flashbacks to their previous lives are quite effective), it was still possible to occasionally mix up some of the bigger dolts. The anti-war aspects are well drawn and the message is delivered in the proper amounts, but there is something (maybe it is just too real) that makes me unsure whether I really like this book or not. ( )

On my list.

Literally the only thing I remember in this book is how the narrator couldn't stand his wife because of the sounds she made in the bathroom. I can say this was a literary turning point for me when I realized reading thngs totally, totally male oriented were not going to do much for me ever again.

My memory of this book is dark, rainy jungles. Pushing cannons up and down hills. Human strength against nature. Constant feeling of fear. People dying meaningless deaths. This novel covers some of the same terrain and battles as "Thin Red Line" but one comes away with a totally different flavor. Good introduction to Mailer.

The best novel about the War in the Pacific ever written. ( )