Books: Love Among the Love-Buckets

THE DEER PARK (375 pp.)—Norman Mailer—Putnam ($4).

"Please do not understand me too quickly," warns Author Mailer by way of a tag (from André Gide). There is not much to understand in this narrative about the life of the West Coast's film fauna: the prose and the sex are as thick as ever. This seemed forgivable in The Naked and the Dead; the boys in a jungle combat platoon ("Kinsey's Army," as one British reviewer called it) were not supposed to talk like lady members of a book club. But in The Deer Park (the...

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