Ambush in the Alley: Barbary Shore and The Deer Park

Abstract

Robert Merrill, the author of a book-length study of Mailer’s work, offers a comprehensive analysis of that work with one outstanding exception. The reader searching for a chapter, or even a section of a chapter on Barbary Shore would find that Merrill simply dismisses Mailer’s second novel as a ‘miserable failure’.¹ Merrill cites Mailer’s remarks on Barbary Shore in Advertisements for Myself, where he makes his appeal to posterity — ‘it could be that if my work is alive one hundred years from now, Barbary Shore will be considered the richest of my first three novels’.² To which Merrill responds, ‘Let us hope not.’³ Others have been just as clear in their condemnation. Richard Gilman tells us that the novel is ‘hopelessly bad, ponderously written, confused, uncertain of what it wants to do, unconvincing in its structure and its imaginative premises’.⁴ Critics who choose other terms with which to judge it seem to be reaching for euphemisms, referring to its ‘transitional nature’,⁵ or to its giving readers ‘moments of intellectual sharpness in a world that is novelistically flat’.⁶ Some have found Barbary Shore well-nigh unreadable. Robert Solotaroff finds that ‘it grows steadily more choked and claustral. One has to struggle to get through the last forty pages.’⁷