The Deer Park

Abstract

A reprint of psychoanalyst Robert Lindner’s review of The Deer Park, first published in the Village Voice on November 9, 1955. Lindner defends the novel against reviewers who read it merely as a Hollywood novel, praising it as a courageous probe of the modern soul and a finely woven study of character set against basic instinct. He faults the handling of the first-person narrator, some gratuitous scenes such as Sergius’s bullfighting, and passages of pretentious philosophizing, yet calls it Mailer’s best book and a giant step beyond The Naked and the Dead and Barbary Shore.