Mailer seems to me by far the best of the novelists who have constructed “language-systems,” because he does so without the coyness, the small-boy innocence and cunning we flinch at in other, less disturbed novelists who are largely American sons of Nabokov, Borges, and Beckett; his maniac broadcast by way of D.J. (or D.J.’s alter ego somewhere in Harlem) is meant to be a real broadcast, a real communication to the public, and its hysterical scatology and obscenity are probably its most important message...

Mailer, in dramatizing this predicament, is speaking for a multitude of voices — or perhaps the voices are speaking through him? A casual reading of Why Are We in Vietnam? reveals the presence of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Robert Lowell, William Burroughs, Hemingway, Faulkner, Melville, Twain, Sterne, Swift, Beckett, Céline, Kafka, Pynchon, Hawkes, Gass, Barth, Proust, Burgess, Freud, Roth, Selby, Genet, Bellow, Lenny Bruce, Borges, and Lawrence, and of course Mailer of the self-interviews and Advertisements, Mailer-as-Juvenile voicing his disgust at Mailer-as-Adult. None of these voices are disguised, the novel is an intentional literary event of magical telepathies (what Mailer is picking out of the air waves that swirl so violently around him), and it is a healthy acknowledgment on his part that he is not and has never been an original writer, but only deluded by the contemporary prejudice for Originality.