Poetry

Mailer’s message, then, is that America is sick, wounded, striking out everywhere in a blind fury, both blasted beast and homicidal hunter. Maybe. But his atavistic nimrods and anthropomorphic animals simply do not carry the premise with convic- tion. Nor does his ploy of turning D.J. and Tex into “killer brothers” after they hear the voice of God, who says: “Go out and kill—fulfill my will, go and kill.” Those don’t sound like the cadences of Biblical speech to me, so which is it? A modern Moloch? The “God” of the State? Never mind, though. The book’s more basic weak- ness, or affront, is the cavalier con- tention that sadistic, murderous sex- ually precarious genes are dominant in the national chromosome.

Here, one must brave a bit of dog- matism: this may be Norman Mail- er’s America, but it ain’t America’s America. That seems to be Mailer’s problem as an author; he can’t really project,- even with the aid of his Magnetic-Electro Zoomar lens, hbe- yond the confines of his own moral concerns and outrages. He reveals