The New York Review of Books

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.

But the book is not a charade, nor a ragbag of Maileriana. If it is loosely strung, it is not casual. For convenience we take the story and the voice as if they were independent, but in fact a relation between them is powerfully maintained. D. J.’s voice is the syntax of the novel, in the sense that it commands whatever it invokes. The unity of the book depends upon a commanding voice rather than a controlling consciousness, because there is no gap between subject and object. This is not to imply that D. J. is a fool, but that only enough consciousness is required of him to sustain a powerful rhetoric, continuity of attack, and a hunter’s sense of natural event. Anything more, including a quotation from Edison, is a bonus. So the main aesthetic problem is the double responsibility to the story and the voice. The story is pastoral, a ritual of purification. D. J. and his friend Tex are purified in the Arctic air, going out to kill their bear while the bad ones, Rusty and Big Luke Fellinka, the hunter’s code broken, are already “beginning to smog the predawning air with their psychic glug, glut and exudations.” This is the moral of the story.

But the moral is elaborately orchestrated by voice and style. The style, it should be remarked, is peculiarly American. Josephine Miles has studied the American Sublime, a high style of praise and panegyric lavished upon the American land, its scale and variety. In poetry this style features “a long free cadenced line, full of silences, symbols, and implications.” In prose, I suggest, it comes to us as a voice, recognizable even before we have …