Why Are We in Vietnam?: A Novel

by Norman Mailer

Paperback, 2000

Status

Available

Call number

813.54

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Publication

Picador (2000), Edition: 1st, 215 pages

Description

When "Why Are We in Vietnam"? was published in 1967, almost twenty years after "The Naked and the Dead," the critical response was ecstatic. The novel fully confirmed Mailer's stature as one of the most important figures in contemporary American literature. Now, a new edition of this exceptional work serves as further affirmation of its timeless quality. Narrated by Ranald ("D.J.") Jethroe, Texas's most precocious teenager, on the eve of his departure to fight in Vietnam, this story of a hunting trip in Alaska is both brilliantly entertaining and profoundly thoughtful.

Media reviews

The Critic

Mailer seems to me by far the best of the novelists who have constructed “language-systems,” because he does so without the coyness, the small-boy innocence and cunning we flinch at in other, less disturbed novelists who are largely American sons of Nabokov, Borges, and Beckett; his maniac

broadcast by way of D.J. (or D.J.’s alter ego somewhere in Harlem) is meant to be a real broadcast, a real communication to the public, and its hysterical scatology and obscenity are probably its most important message... Mailer, in dramatizing this predicament, is speaking for a multitude of voices — or perhaps the voices are speaking through him? A casual reading of Why Are We in Vietnam? reveals the presence of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Lowell, William Burroughs, Hemingway, Faulkner, Melville, Twain, Sterne, Swift, Beckett, Céline, Kafka, Pynchon, Hawkes, Gass, Barth, Proust, Burgess, Freud, Roth, Selby, Genet, Bellow, Lenny Bruce, Borges, and Lawrence, and of course Mailer of the self-interviews and Advertisements, Mailer-as-Juvenile voicing his disgust at Mailer-as-Adult. None of these voices are disguised, the novel is an intentional literary event of magical telepathies (what Mailer is picking out of the air waves that swirl so violently around him), and it is a healthy acknowledgment on his part that he is not and has never been an original writer, but only deluded by the contemporary prejudice for Originality.

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User reviews

LibraryThing member Fenoxielo

When you think about it, the only way to really answer the question of why the U.S. was in Vietnam is to NOT talk about Vietnam. The word only appears three times: once in the title, and twice in the last paragraph. The rest of the book is a modern Moby-Dick in the Alaskan wilderness, with a Texas

CEO dragging his son, D.J., and subordinates on a fanatical hunt for a bear. Both an allegory for the Vietnam War, complete with helicopter raids on herds of ram, and a startling portrait of the generational divide developing in the late '60s that resulted in so many dead young men at the whim of older men, Why Are We in Vietnam? is at the same time beautiful and obscene and horrifically violent. Narrated by young D.J., Disc Jockey to America, a vulgar Holden Caulfield channeling Humbert Humbert, Why Are We In Vietnam? forces us to consider the war without thinking about the war itself. The fact of the matter is, this novel could just as well have been set in 2001, for all the similarities with the most recent Gulf War. Even though Vietnam is over, Mailer's novel will never cease to be relevant, not to mention incredibly entertaining.

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LibraryThing member joeydag

Too long ago. Was there where the children are fighting about standing up their father and it is symbolic about our ignorance and folly in fighting overseas?

LibraryThing member DinadansFriend

Mailer uses the metaphor of a hunting trip to explore some of the ways in which young men are exploited by older men. We get a healthy dose of Melville echoes as well, and more references to the writings of other men than we normally get from Mailer. It is a raw book, because the process can be

very violent in real life. well worth reading, but one should remember the Title is reflective, not directly related to the matter of the book. There are virtually no direct references to the war of 1959-75 in the novel.

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