Norman Mailer’s second novel was the first casualty of the phenomenal success of his first, The Naked and the Dead. The American post-war public had been eager for a novel which epitomised the nation’s struggle, and Mailer’s realistic epic gave them precisely that. Its popularity was as much a product of victorious euphoria as it was of Mailer’s innate gifts. The fact that he was 25 years old added to his cache as an all-American literary lion. His achievement mirrored that of the nation’s, his promise was of the same order as that of a nation on the crest of world supremacy. To properly meet this expectation, Mailer’s second novel would have needed to be at least a panorama of American peace-…
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