Customer Reviews

The Deer Park

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

It's interesting to see Mailer's take on the Hollywood witchhunts, directors testifying before Congress and forced to name names, and the goings-on of the Hollywood rich and famous. But the first-person framing device is tiresome and cliched, and Mailer has done much much better. Read this if you are a big Mailer fan or love Hollywood in the 50s, otherwise I'd take a pass and move on to greener pastures.

Norman initially intended this as the first volume in an eight-novel cycle, but then got distracted in the Village, chasing Time, and so lowered his ambition. It's always amazing when a phallic narcissist lowers his sights, and that's what we have here.

And so we have to be satisfied with "The Man Who Studied Yoga" as the prologue to the Park, and "The Time of Her Time" as a kind of epilogue, though that piece itself is a fragment from an uncompleted work, because Norman got distracted again, this time farther uptown, and there were cops and shrinks involved, which of course is enough to lead the phallic narcissist into outright nonfiction.

If there is such a thing as the nonfiction novel, then the Park presents us with the fiction essay. Form is exploded here, and you'd better abandon any notions you might have of what a "novel" is. Point of view, for instance, is little more than an annoyance in Desert D'Or, and so Sergius, the incipient writer who is soon to become a phallic narcissist himself, is happy to narrate scenes that take place long after he splits the scene.

This is all very interesting in itself, but the 1950s were when Norman really started disliking people, and I suppose the 50s were as good a time as any to start hating humanity. Sympathetic characters? You won't find them here, and it can really grow your aesthetic to try to enjoy a novel--or even a fictional essay such as this one--without them.

Still, it can be a drag to spend this much Time with so many unlikeable people. Everybody is a contemptible whore (as in sell-out) in this book, including, well, the whores. This is what Norman means in his "First Advertisement" by insisting upon "that Reality whose existence may depend on the honest life of our work, the honor of ourselves which permits us to say no better than we have seen."

Yikes, and Norman thought World War II was bad? It was nothing compared to Hollywood, daddy-o.

Even so, I've read this book five times since I was sixteen, probably because I've been depressed only about five times since then and that is when the Park will really pick you up. The prose begins to sizzle. The insult to form seems revolutionary. There still isn't much wisdom in the book, but what the heck, we can still be glad that we don't have to work for Marion Faye or Herman Teppis, right?

Of course, this book was written before the economic recessions of the '70s, '80s, or today. In the current environment, you may well have to work for Faye or Teppis. In that case, the Park could become a field manual for you. You will learn not to flinch whenever Faye tells you to drown your children, or whenever Teppis does his Bill Clinton imitation 43 years before the fact. Bad art becomes prophecy, and in the '50s Norman was always more interested in being a prophet than in being a very good novelist.

Even if you're not depressed, the book has its three-star moments. The party scene is very entertaining, or at least it is until Sergius wanders off to make it with LuLu. I would have preferred to stay at the party, with Elena babbling insanely about expensive melted ice cream. Unfortunately, at this point in the novel Sergius is still restricting himself to narrating those scenes at which he is actually present, so we're obligated to leave the party with him and watch him make it with that very uninteresting blond movie star, LuLu Myers. Somebody please shoot her. No, wait, it's a cliche to shoot a cliche.

And yet, the scene in which Teppis tries to force LuLu to marry Rock Hudson--uh, I mean, the closeted actor Teddy Pope--is quite a marvel to watch. Half a century later, the only thing that isn't creepy about this scene is the fact that Teddy Pope is gay.

Overall, however, I would say that most of the pleasures here are structural. It's fun to watch the novel completely break down in places, such as in Elena's interminable, chapter-long letter. This woman is insane, and the only thing drearier than reading about her is to read something that she would write. Still, it's fun to see just how bad the writing can get as it continues to stumble forward. Get out the popcorn and Doritos. There are structural train wrecks to enjoy here.

So don't take it too seriously. Like any book, it's just words on the page. It's a "sex" "novel" without any genitals in it and it reads more like crazy, notebook reportage than a novel. Chill out, daddy-o, it's flip city. Norman is a nerd but he's trying really, really hard to be cooler than an entire city full of creeps. And all of the inherent tensions become very enjoyable once you are "hep" to them.

At one time, as with Ernest Hemingway, I tried to get my hands on everything that Norman Mailer wrote. In his prime he held out promise to match Hemingway as the pre-eminent male American prose writer. Mailer certainly had the ambition, ego and skill to do so. In his inevitable search to write the great American novel, at least for his generation, I do not believe, that he was successful. The Deer Park is an early attempt to tackle that goal and while there are flashes of brilliance there is far too much self-consciousness on making a great American novel. That most dramatically got reflected in the tinniness of his characters, male and female, and reduced the book to a fairly ordinary look at a slice of the American pie.

Certainly the subject matter of the novel is an almost surefire way to get attention. Put Hollywood-types in 'exile' in the desert, add wayward movie stars, starlets and wannabes, and a male lead character who is not sure what he wants to be but is sure that the stars shine for him somewhere and you have the makings of a great American novel. Throw in, almost obligatory for a `fifties' novel and for a self-described leftist like Mailer , the tensions surrounding the `red scare', Hollywood- style, and the cultural clamp down that imposed on American society and one should be onto something. But, strangely, Mailer gets bogged down in the sexual escapades of the main characters and never gets to the heart of the real question that the novel poses- How the hell does one safeguard his or her creative expression without selling out to every conceivable pressure that comes along? It did not work, but nice try Norman.

This unfortunate book suffers from an acute case of aphoristic intoxication, evidenced in such pithy morsels as: "like most cynics he was profoundly sentimetal about sex" and "our marriage was the meeting of zero and zero."

Although such modestly entertaining observations kept me plodding along, the book is a lame attempt at armchair beat philosophizing, ensnarled in a wholly unengaging plot and unbelievably boring characters. I first read about this greatest of books in Joe Ezterhas's biography, and it makes sense that he would consider its shallow machisimo the stuff of masterpieces.

Avoid this. Reread Day of the Locust. Recommended for only the most die-hard of Hollywood historians or cultural completists.

I agree with the reviewer who said that this novel is lacking any form of life. It is boring and trite and I couldn't finish it either. I usually always finish a book even if I'm not particularly enjoying it but this was beyond endurance. This is the only one of Mailer's novels I have attempted to read. I had seen Mailer interviewed a few times and this book confirmed my suspicion that he is a bag of wind. Mailer is an overblown, immature, egotistical narcissist.

i was a little disapointed that this book was so much about the world of actors,producers,and directors. i was hoping for more out right debauchary and vice.mostly i think it was focused way to much on the director eitel.i found him less than interesting, i would have thought this book a waste of my time if it wasnt for the burnout spiritual pimp,marion faye.he was the shadow in the background of all the movie people living in the spotlight.this shadow was my light.a book focused on marion would be a book of a god in the shadows.instead this book was focused on a bunch of arrogant show buisness pepople.

'The Deer Park' should become compulsary reading for the human race - forget school reading lists. It is an absolute masterpiece and Mailer's way words could knock Donna Tartt (author of Secret History) for six any day of the week. If you want to read a real masterpiece - sink your teeth into Mailer's 'Deer Park.' James P. Robinson