An enormous, sprawling novel about a group of American soldiers fighting in the Pacific in WW2. It's one of those books that goes into the "admire but didn't really like" pile. I can see what Mailer's trying to do, and credit where it's due he can be very effective. This is a deeply cynical take on war, one that does its best to show the dehumanisation of the individual soldiers, the waste and effect that war has on them. In this The Naked and the Dead is successful. It is also deeply monotonous.

It has taken me months, literally months, to get through this. I had to push myself to finish it. 700+ pages, and the tone does not vary. It takes a dozen odd characters and strips them down with (and to) varying degrees of nastiness. Mailer was drawing on his own wartime experiences, or so I understand, so there's likely a high degree of realism in here, but for all the adequacies of the characterisation, those characters were unlikeable and I didn't care at all what happened to them. It didn't much help that their attitudes all tended to coalesce as the book stumped its way on - yes, I get that this is part of the theme, reducing individuals to cogs in the military machine, but Mailer could have done that with fewer characters and half the page count. I'm not giving it one star because there are interesting aspects, and the working intelligence behind all these moving parts is clear. I only wish that intelligence had come with an editing function.