Books: Hot Damn

WHY ARE WE IN VIETNAM? by Norman Mailer. 208 pages. Putnam. $4.95.

A better question is: Why did Norman Mailer write this book? Even better: Why did Putnam publish it? Never once does Mailer comment on the war n Vietnam. Even the name Vietnam is mentioned only twice in the book, and then in the final paragraph.

The publishers call this curious book about four Texans on a bear hunt in

Alaska a novel. Beyond that, they prefer to pass all judgments on to the readers. Says the jacket blurb: “There will be some who say Why Are We in Vietnam? is the first classic Norman Mailer has written. Others are sure to suggest it is the most foul-mouthed book to come along since publishers were pups.”

In fact, the book is a wildly turgid monologorrhea narrated by “D.J.,” an 18-year-old Dallas scion, who spews obscenity like—like Norman Mailer. DJ.

calls himself “Disc Jockey to America,” suggesting that his stream of consciousness represents the whole nation on the couch. As for the story, and mercifully there is one, DJ. loves-hates his rich father, a victim of all alleged Texas hang-ups, notably insecure masculinity. Mailer plunks father, son and a couple of unholy Texas ghosts in Alaska’s Brooks Mountain Range on a safari in search of manhood. Naturally, they cheat: in orgiastically killing a wolf, numerous caribou and three grizzlies, the hunters unsportingly use a helicopter instead of their feet. Though he hardly clarifies his intention, Mailer apparently figures that he has thus allegorized Vietnam as a case of Texas-style Americans neurotically in love with war. The book ends with DJ. happily looking forward to hunting guerrillas as well as grizzlies. Says he: “Vietnam, hot damn.”

If readers are willing to unravel yards of obscuring verbiage, they will find flashes of vivid comic writing—and a sometimes gripping Field & Stream hunting yarn told in what Mailer fondly believes to be the accents of Ernest Hemingway. Unhappily, Mailer is not only politically naive; even his doggedly filthy language is grade-B graffiti.

For pure pornography, he is pitifully outclassed by both Henry Miller and William Burroughs.