The Naked and the Dead – Norman Mailer

We’ve all seen the WWII movie in which a mixed group of young American men (Mexican, Italian, WASP etc) go into war together. Some of them turn out to be heroes, some cowards, and the first one to mention his girl back home in Wichita gets his head blown off.

This book, published at a raw time in 1948, pretty much epitomises the format. There’s barely a memorable sentence in it but Mailer’s storytelling verve is evident in this, his first book. The more arty flashbacks are clearly influenced by Dos Passos.

I found the euphemistic swearing rather endearing (a lot of “fugging”), but at the time it was enough to provoke the Sunday Times into running a front page leader demanding that the novel be banned in the UK. Oh reactionaries, when will you ever learn?