Norman Mailer: American Writer
The Naked and the Often Long Winded
The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer’s much acclaimed first novel, set in the Pacific during World War Two, is considered by many (including its author)to be a masterpiece, and a novel that could become the equivalent of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Personally, I’m not so sure it could ever have done that. Yes, the novel is good (Mailer had served in the Pacific), but it’s no masterpiece due solely to the use of the word ‘fug’ as a replacement (insisted upon by Mailer’s publisher)for the real F word. By making that change the novel is weakened. It would have been better to have left the F words out completely, thereby maintaining and strengthening the novel’s integrity.
Nevertheless. the novel was extremely successful, selling 200,000 copies in its first three months, remaining in the New York Times best seller list for 62 weeks. It was later named one of the top one hundred novels in the English language. It was also listed by the US publishing industry as one of the best novels of 1948, and it still sells well.
In the UK the Labour politician and critic, Tom Driberg, in his Times Literary Supplement review wrote that Mailer’s novel “grows increasingly unreadable” due to the author deciding to “leave nothing out”. There’s no mention of what he thought of the word ‘fug’.
