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Riffling the dead leaves of a bankrupt dream, neo-Marxist Mailer sees one faint hope, "socialist culture." This idea, which ex-Stalinist McLeod passes on to Lovett as a heritage—just before Government Agent Hollingsworth does him in—seems to be the precious "little object" the poor fellow has been nursing all along.
Mailer nails his flag to the mast as a sort of last-of-the-intellectual-leftists. But his novel, paceless, tasteless and graceless, is beached on a point of no fictional, or intellectual, return.