Volume 9, Number 5 · September 28, 1967
Sweepstakes
By Denis Donoghue
Why Are We In Vietnam?
by Norman Mailer
Putnam, 208 pp., $4.95
Death Kit
by Susan Sontag
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 312 pp., $5.75
The Puzzleheaded Girl
by Christina Stead
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 255 pp., $6.95
The narrator of Mr. Mailer's novel is D. J., a foul-mouthed disc jockey in Dallas, 'Big D in Tex.' More formally, he is Ranald Jethroe, son of Alice Hallie Lee Jethroe and David Rutherford Jethroe, Hallie and Rusty for short. Officially, he tells of a hunting trip in Alaska, but the narrative voice is louder than the story. D.J. is something of a lay preacher, the plot is his text, and the book itself is theme and variations, mostly variations on politics, big business, Texas, George Hamilton, the CIA, and sundry occasions of venom. On the second page D.J. quotes Thomas Edison out of Marshall McLuhan, but this is a false alarm, he does not continue in that vein. Indeed, we hear no more of books when he goes down to basic concerns, Texan folkways, violence, fathers and sons. Some of these matters are disposed in free-wheeling essays between the narrative sections, but the divisions of interest are informal. Many pages may be construed as D. J.'s advertisements for himself; the whole book, perhaps, as advertisements for William Burroughs and the author of Ulysses, who figures in the text as 'Dr. James Joyce.' D. J. is given to horsing around and joycing around, like any good disc jockey in Big D.
Review, 3387 words
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