The Deer Park - Softcover

Mailer, Norman

3.26

1,403 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375700404 ISBN 13: 9780375700408

Publisher: Vintage Books, 1997

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In the Southern California resort town of Desert D'Or, a town controlled for profit by the motion-picture industry, sexual incontinence, avarice, and general corruption taint the lives, relationships, and characters of a select group of men and women. Reprint. 12,500 first printing.

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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 �lite 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

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