Desert D'Or is the fashionable Californian resort where Hollywood's elite converge when they need a break. It is an incestuous hothouse of a town - a haven for manipulators, film stars, lovers, pimps, producers, whores, gamblers, scriptwriters and cheats. Into this nightmare world of depravity arrives Sergius O'Shaughnessy, recently discharged from the Air Force, traumatised by his ar experiences and trying to write the Great American Novel. But O'Shaughnessy's burning ambition begins to lose its edge; lured by greed and rules by weakness, he soon becomes disturbingly familiar with the dnagerous life of slick compromises and sexual follies...The Deer Park is a powerful and vigorous satire on Hollywood's excesses and corruption. Combining a savage imagination with a heightened documentary realism, Mailer paints an uncompromising and terrifying portriat of a decadent society lost in moral confusion and despair.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
The Deer Park ranks with F Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon and Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust. - Newsweek
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About the Author
Norman Mailer was born in 1923 and served in the South Pacific in WWII. Twice awarded the Pulizter Prize for The Armies of the Night and The Executioner's Song.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Another book review,
By skag_vicar (uk) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Deer Park (Paperback)
yeah, this book's pretty good if you like strong characters and no storyline. Its set in the 50s in a desert town populated by rich and powerful Hollywood people, and our hero wanders around getting to know these corrupt, weird and sometimes dangerous characters without anything really happening. But hey, its insightful and written with real verve by Mr Mailer, just don't expect too much from the storyline.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
The Gangs All Here! Who cares?,
By
This review is from: The Deer Park (Paperback)
I have to hand it to Mr. Mailer. A dose of respect that is. His ambitions were large, and his skill at wrapping my mind around them has proven energetic, unguarded and detailed. The Deer Park was only the second of his works I've read (the other being The Gospel According to the Son)and one that I am glad to have finished. It took a while. Too long.
For every notion that the Palm Springs-like resort he created in Desert d'Or was a bold Hollywood vision of our pre-celebrity tabloid saturated world of unending scandal and duplicity, there was a lack of interest in the very meat of his message. The depraved and the damned may be seen as the mighty among us, but their interior doesn't fare very well through Mailer's extensive, overwritten prose. Passages are brilliantly evocative, tense and emotionally resonant, but they are separated by swathes of self-consciousness hoping to impress. The heart of the matter is fickle, I didn't care for the characters, their doings were not very interesting, I wondered more if these people were based on real things, and the name Sergius O'Shaughnessy, self given, symbolic and absurd poses a hiccup every time. But I still plan on reading more of Mr. Mailer. R.I.P.
9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mailer's best,
By
This review is from: The Deer Park (Paperback)
This is by far the best Mailer novel I have read. I appreciate that it is not for everyone - the characters are not particularly likeable and the plot rambles forwards without any real structure. But this is a work of verisimilitude and the writing is superb.
I have read several Mailer novels now and I consider him to be one of the most talented American writers of the twentieth century even if he did not quite live up to his potential. This book is probably his masterpiece and I believe he considered it himself to be his best work for many years. I encourage anyone interested in Mailer or American literature to have another, closer look at this one.
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