The Deer Park - Softcover

Mailer, Norman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0586047689 ISBN 13: 9780586047682

Publisher: Grafton, 1978

Synopsis

A savage and controversial satire on Hollywood and the American middle classes. The setting is Desert D'Or, the fashionable Californian resort where Hollywood's glittering elite converge when they need a break from the city of celluloid dreams. It's an incestuous hothouse of a town.

About this title

Review:

The Deer Park ranks with F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon and Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust (Newsweek)

Brilliant and illuminating (New York Times)

From the Back Cover:

Desert D'Or is the fashionable Californian resort where Hollywood's glittering élite converge when they need a break from the city of celluloid dreams. It is an incestuous hothouse of a town – a haven for manipulators, film stars, lovers, pimps, producers, whores, gamblers, scriptwriters and cheats.

Into this nightmare world of depravity arrives Sergius O'Shaughnessy, recently discharged from the Air Force, traumatised by his war experiences and trying to write the Great American Novel. But O'Shaughnessy's burning ambition begins to lose its edge as he is drawn deeper into the reckless lives of Charles Eitel, the disgraced film genius, Lulu Meyers, the egomaniacal young movie star and the seedy, perspiring studio chief Herman Teppis. Lured by greed and ruled by weakness, O'Shaughnessy soon becomes disturbingly familiar with the dangerous life of slick compromises and sexual follies...

Mailer's third novel, 'The Deer Park' is a powerful and vigorous satire on Hollywood's excesses and corruptions. Combining a savage imagination with a heightened documentary realism, Mailer painted an uncompromising and terrifying portrait of a society in moral confusion and despair.

“It is the peculiar insight and power of 'The Deer Park' that it does not present its unhappy conditions sensationally, but as though they were common enough, which they are, and as though people succeeded in living with them for years, which they do. As a Hollywood novel, 'The Deer Park' ranks with F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Last Tycoon' and Nathanael West's 'The Day of the Locust'. It speaks for promising, gifted people anywhere who have succumbed to their appetites and lost their spirit among the singularly intricate temptations of the modern world.”
NEWSWEEK

About this edition

• Publisher: Grafton
• Publication date: 1978
• ISBN 10: 0586047689
• ISBN 13: 9780586047682
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 416