Norman Mailer’s Hollywood novel.
Power, ambition, sex, vanity, and performance. Set in a desert resort town populated by washed-up actors, producers, publicists, ex-military men, aspiring actresses, and professional charm merchants, Mailer gives us his fevered autopsy of postwar American masculinity. Everybody is selling themselves. Everybody is performing certainty. Everybody is tired.
Mailer was noticing the 50's fame and it's stain of contamination, intimacy as transaction, politics as social theatre, personality as labour. The dialogue has that hyper-alert Mailer quality where every conversation feels half seduction, half dominance ritual. A lot of casual cruelty, particularly in the way women are discussed as symbolic terrain rather than people — becomes part of the book’s pathology rather than simply incidental period detail. Mailer is both implicated in and dissecting the world he’s writing about, which is why the book remains fascinating even when it becomes ugly, self-mythologising, or swollen with masculine performance.
Pre-New Journalism Mailer here was already circling the themes he’d later weaponise more directly: spectacle, ego, American decay, sexuality, power, celebrity, political paranoia. There’s a reason Joan Didion, Bret Easton Ellis, Eve Babitz, DeLillo, and the whole ecosystem of LA cultural fiction feel downstream from books like this, even when reacting against them.
1991 Paladin paperback edition of Mailer’s 1957 novel, with Norman Mailer’s later preface included. Clean copy with light shelf wear and age toning typical of the edition.
