Barbary Shore
Norman MailerPublished at the height of the McCarthy era, Norman Mailer's audacious novel of socialismis at once an elegy and an indictment, a sinuous moral thriller and an intellectual slugfest. Wounded during World War II, Mike Lovett is an amnesiac, and much of his past is a secret to himself. But when Lovett rents a room in Brooklyn, he finds that his housemates have secrets of their own: One betrays a husband no one ever sees; another may have been a Communist executioner. Combining Kafkaesque unease with Orwellian paranoia, Barbary Shore plays havoc with our certainties and delivers its effects with a force that is pure Mailer.
Praise for Barbary Shore
"A work of remarkable power, of amazing penetration, both into people and the determining forces of American life."--The Atlantic Monthly
"Vibrant with life, abundant with real people . . . [Mailer has] a scintillating skill in observation, a mature sense of...