One week put Norman Mailer on two best-of lists that could hardly be further apart, and the distance between them is the point.
In The Week, film critic and historian David Thomson — whose new A Sudden Flicker of Light argues that cinema has in fact been a damaging cultural force — chose his “best books” about the movies. Alongside Nathanael West, Fitzgerald, and Lillian Ross, he names The Deer Park (1955): “still the best novel about love, lust, identity, money, honor, power, producers, and actors.” Mailer’s Hollywood roman à clef, set against the pleasure ground of Palm Springs, follows a war hero who toys with selling his life story to the movies.
The same days, over at Collider, Luc Haasbroek ranked “The Best Military Thriller Books of All Time” and placed The Naked and the Dead (1948) at number five — “a more literary take on the military thriller, elevated by master craftsman Norman Mailer,” and “a remarkably human portrait of warfare, one that avoids simplistic heroism while also never diminishing the courage of the fighters.”
A war novel and a Hollywood novel; a serious film historian’s shelf and a genre countdown for readers who want combat and suspense. Seventy-odd years on, the same writer lands on both without strain — the platoon on Anopopei and the back lot at Desert D’Or turning out to be two surveys of the same ground: power, and the men who want it.