A review by jackb_93
The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History by Norman Mailer

Finally finished the goddamn thing as even though it isn't very long, my patience flagged halfway through and I put it down for a while. It was worth getting to the end though, as that's where the thing comes together and the poetic insights start coming thick and fast. There are sentences that knock you out all the way through, but when Mailer gets on his sustained stretch of greatness like he does in the last 20 pages of this, he really starts to live up to his reputation. Mailer posits that in 1968 America was pregnant with possibility, and could either birth a new world of compassion or a new style of totalitarianism in which corporation-land wages daily war on the human condition. Reading this from the vantage point of 2020, it's a rather heartbreaking ending. The lessons from the war in Vietnam are very much unlearned