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Barbary Shore

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When asked what he thought of Norman Mailer, writer Charles Bukowski often responded, "I don't think of Norman Mailer." Those who have read Mailer's second novel, Barbary Shore, should understand Buke's sentiment. Set chiefly in a Brooklyn boarding house, Barbary Shore more or less details the relationships between an amnesiac young WWII veteran and his kooky housemates. Radical politics serve as a backdrop to the book, but Mailer's dull prose and the passing of time deflate any topical relevance.

The novel is primarily composed of lengthy and boring conversations between the narrator and his housemates, as well as Mailer's first-person doddering about his neighborhood. It seems that Mailer intends for his dialogue to advance the plot and to develop the characters. Unlike Steinbeck, Mailer fails at this task. His dialogue is too long, too ponderous, and intolerably fake. The characters are as believable as those of Ian Fleming, yet far less intriguing or sexy.

In sum, this book is lousy. There is nothing else to say about it. A contextual analysis or meaningful critique is not warranted.

In the future, other works by Mailer will certainly be remembered by critics and English departments worldwide. For example, The Naked & The Dead will be recalled as a solid war novel. As for Barbary Shore? At best a sophomore slump. I want my money back--and from the author himself.

When we begin comparing different books by an author, we can run into problems. Each book, I believe, should be judged on its own. While Barbary Shore was certainly not my all time favorite book in the entire world, I could not put it down, either. Mailer's use of language, and his word choices, added to the overall feel of the novel. The feeling during the height of the McCarthy Era was one of caution and fear. I believe that he captured these things through his language choices as well as through the characters and their actions. Is this one of Mailer's best books? Probably not. I heard him speak several months ago in California. He was funny, charming, and he said that he believed Ancient Evenings was one of his favorites. At times, during Barbary Shore, it is a bit difficult to figure out what is going on, but that's what compelled me to continue with the book. I had to know. Mailer brought these characters to life, particularly with his wonderful descriptions. It is a book I would read again, and it will occupy a space on one of my many bookshelves. It was not, however, a fast paced book. It took me a bit of time to read. In fact, I had finished several other books in the time it took me to finish this one, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. There were things he wrote in this book, too, that ring true even today, particularly at the beginning of chapter 24, when he discusses the big, rich companies, the machine that makes capitalism go and grow, and the workers. "The man grew smaller and the machine grew larger,..." he writes. Isn't this true today? It's worth a first, careful read.

A few things grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and made themselves evident to me when I read this novel. Firstly, Norman Mailer is a much smarter man than I, secondly, Norman Mailer can write very well when he wants to, and thirdly, he can do a lot better than this.

Set in a boarding house with a serious of muddled characters and little to drive the narrative outside of dialogue, the book fails to reach the heights that were probably imagined for it in it's conception. It is my second experience with Mailer, the first being The Fight, which I rate very highly. This novel, despite it's best efforts, have failed to seal my opinion of Mailer. Maybe I should read The Naked and The Dead and be done with it. In short, I think there are better books out there to be read.

As I recently noted in this space while reviewing Norman Mailer's The Presidential Papers and Miami and the Siege of Chicago at one time, as with Ernest Hemingway, I tried to get my hands on everything that the late author wrote. In his prime Mailer held out promise to match Hemingway as the preeminent male American prose writer of the 20th century. Mailer certainly has the ambition, ego and skill to do so. Although he wrote several good novels, like The Deer Park, in his time I believe that his journalistic work, as he himself might have partially admitted, especially his political, social and philosophical musings are what will insure his place in the literary pantheon. The early novel Barbary Shore under review here only confirms that estimation of his proper place. This is not a Mailer gem.

This novel was written shortly after Mailer's huge success with the Naked and the Dead and seemingly shared the fate of many second novels- failure to live up to expectations. Not, however, for the reasons one might think. Yes, the plot is a little contrived in building up the tensions between fellow New York rooming house lodgers, including the narrator, a wounded war veteran trying to scratch out an existence as a writer, who seem to have no existent except to act as foils for each other. Yes, the dialogue is a little forced as each character has to be just a little more arch and a little more tragic that the others. Moreover, the action is virtually nonexistent as the rooming house acts as a metaphor turning on itself here.

However none of these reasons are what causes the novel to fail. The politics, or more properly the confused philosophy, underlying the novel are too big to survive in the space allotted. The characters here, including a repentant Stalinist, a dogged governmental Red hunter and a thwarted socialist idealist are symbols for the very real struggle in Mailer's head, and in those of other Western intellectuals in the post- World War II period as well, to make sense of the contradiction between the promise of old socialist vision and the way it was being played out under Stalinist tutelage. The historic socialist struggle between Stalin and Trotsky that dominated the first half of the 20th century, American version here, as played by the denizens of a New York rooming house cannot be contained in such a milieu.

Moreover, the existentialist philosophy, with a twist of Kafka, that essentially reduces social action to the unmediated acts of individuals that would dominant much of Mailer's later writing gets its first tentative workout here as the pressure of the `Red Scare' McCarthy era and the flight from seeking socialist solutions began to have its effect on the New York intelligentsia in the early 1950's. Nevertheless it is still worthwhile to read something that is thoughtfully, if not successfully, written, as is almost always the case with Mailer. And that is really the place where Mailer finds his comradeship with Hemingway.

Mailer's second novel is that rare thing, a dull book. Overwhelmed with the success of Naked and the Dead, Mailer sought to write a Kafkaesque political thriller set against the
pulsing paranoia of the fifties, and finds himself tripped up by haphazard plotting, grating dialogue, and wooden characters.The dialogue, it needs to be said, is the stiffest assortment of cold war banter one could imagine from a political novel set in the 1950s; there is a particular failure to connect the various political disillusionments that abound through these pages with the chronically self-loathing slouching that goes on as the men and women schlep room to room in the story's shabby rooming house. Had this been an absurdist comedy, one might have gotten an appreciative chuckle if not a belly laugh by what Mailer was doing ,but this is played straight, serious as tax audit, and there is little air in the private hells each chapter outlines. The novel is remarkable if only because it wound up not being the career killer for Mailer that this sort of graceless and pretentious effort would mean for a less resilient talent. But Resilient Mailer is, as his steely production following this lethargic parable evinces.

It's interesting to note that he refers to his subsequent collection and memoir "Advertisements for Myself" as a "biography of a style", detailing his struggle to absorb and transcend his influences with a voice that was his alone , a style that would be his instrument his brilliant efforts to provoke and inspire and anger his readers.

He has particularly moving and insightful things to say about the struggle he had in the writing and rewriting of "Barbary Shore", and in retrospect we witness in the book a great writer choking on his ambition as he wrestles with a set of ideas he cannot yet put into a beautifully writ set of paragraphs. Mailer would soon develop one of the best prose styles of his time, but suffice to say that he hadn't yet come up with a set of nuances uniquely his own when this book emerged.

Hard to believe, but when this book first appeared (it was Mailer's second novel), it was the most talked about novel of the year. What Mailer attempts here is a spooky, Kafkaesque atmosphere centered around a gloomy Brooklyn boarding house full of mysterious tenents - one of whom the young narrator fixates upon, and who turns out to be the instigator (following Stalin's orders) of the murder of Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. This theme attaches the novel more to the earlier half of the century rather than the later, because its concerns - a sense of loss and bewilderment at how the radical dreams of the century's start had completely failed to find any positive fruition - were rapidly losing their hold on American intellectuals of the post-war world. Barbary Shore does impart convincingly a sense of loss - of ideals disabused - and in that sense the book is a kind of clumsy version of The God That Failed.

The problem with the book is in its execution. The Kafka atmosphere seems half-baked, even provincial - Mailer seems to have "dipped in" to Kafka rather than having actually enjoyed reading him. The whole episode of the mysterious tenent and the secret he carries - the best part of the book - seemed (to me) constantly hampered by Mailer's poor telling. As a reader I'm not surprised that Mailer more or less gave up fiction and turned to historical novels or journalism for the bulk of his career.

1949 was a bad year for some writers. The other "most talked about" book was John Horne Burns' Lucifer With a Book. Burns had written the first-rate war novel The Gallery, a lyrical piece of prose set in end-of-the-war Naples. But Lucifer With a Book was about the naughty goings-on at a boys' prep school - not something America could handle in 1949. Burns was dunned out of the States, by outraged critics who thought they had been praising a "war novelist," and soon drank himself to death in Europe. At least Mailer found a niche in journalism. Try Mailer's writings on the moon shot, were he's fascinating.

McLeod is a man with a shady past. A former Communist Party official, he is now residing in a rooming house in Brooklyn just after the end of World War II. McLeod is being tailed by Hollingsworth, also a resident in the same establishment. Hollingsworth suspects McLeod of too many things and desires to interrogate and entrap him. The novel's narrator, Mike Lovett, is a disabled war veteran suffering from a severe case of amnesia. He just wants to be left alone to write his novel. He instead becomes entangled with these two gentlemen as well as with the lonely, slatternly landlady and her annoying little daughter. A down-and-out alcoholic woman also rents a room here. She also knows of some horrible secrets in McLeod's past and aims to exact some measure of revenge on him.

So goes Norman Mailer's novel of cold war intrigue. The premise of a man's radical past catching up with him and his desparate attempts to come to terms with the choices he made in his life is a good one. However, Mailer deals with these issues and his characters in an overly shallow manner. The characters come across more like types, e.g. the earnest radical socialist, rather than like real people. Mike, whose personality is largely one-dimensional, is merely a plot device, a medium through whom the other characters interact. Mike's character could easily have been eliminated. The story could have been far more interesting and even devastating were it told from the point of view of McLeod. What I believe Mailer meant to be the centerpiece of the novel, McLeod's lengthy speech on the nature of revolutionary socialism vs. state capitalism, is merely boring and flat. Too bad Mailer could not follow through on an otherwise excellent germ of an idea.

Starting over with a clean slate is an idea that is looked upon and desired. The concept of Barbary SHore was a brilliant idea for Mailer to attempt writing about. Mike, being an amnesiac wanted to piece his life back together, but could not trust his thoughts and the images that came to his mind. Upon moving into a house with many tenants of diverse personalities, he had the perfect chance to recollect thoughts and concepts.

However, Mailer failed to use the concept effectively. He did use Mike at first to absorb the thoughts and ideas projected by the tenants, but they did not stay with him and did not have a lasting effect on his search for a stable mind. Mailer basically shrugged off a freat opportunity to cause a great conflict of mental confusion in Mike, to strongly contribute to the plot.

Mailer's writing did not help the novel's cause either. His narration became monotonous because of a lack of variation of sentence structure and writing style, along with dragged out descriptions that were not at all exciting to read. Also, the conversations that happened in the novel were boring because of the author's tendencies towards over describing. They were also horribly routine. Basically the writing in the novel was boring. The only interesting aspect of Mailer's writing was his analogies. It was interesting how he related things that were very alike, but not in an obvious manner. But that did not save the novel. Also adding to the monotony of the novel was that it serves more as a declaration of Mailer's political views instead of a statement of emotion. Because of Mailer's rambling no one looking for an inspirational book should seek such in this novel since all it has to offer is political insight. Unfortunately, I was no tseeking any such insight, and was bored by the novel.

Basically I just want to say that i totally agree with the review below mine. The story plods clumsily on like a malformed clubfoot, and the prose is dead (it reminded me of a rather depressing hybrid of Kafka and Hemingway: two sleep-inducers). Anyhow if i see Norman around i am gonna make him buy me a drink for this one.