One Soldier As Victim

...Without such distinctions, there is no sense of the ambiguity of human affairs, and the novel becomes too simple to believe...

...The Patriot is an honest, compassionate piece of writing and one which ought to engage the reader's sympathy...

...Because he lacks the instinct to give himself up to the state or the war or the other total fictions with which men busy themselves, he is by nature sane, and innocently confused amid insanity...

...But it is likely that this cannot be done without intruding sentimentality, if only because the victim's perspective excludes the possibility of certain ethical distinctions traditionally crucial to the novel: those all-important distinctions of the lesser evil...

...It is inconceivable that there can be a major novel with a passive hero...

...But because the young man is the sort who can understand only what he experiences, he cannot feel properly virtuous and is increasingly distressed...

...This is why a novelist like Norman Mailer will always have a chance to write an important novel, whereas writers like Truman Capote or J. D. Salinger can at their best make nothing more than extremely touching symptomatology...

...For the novelist, as well as his hero, it is not enough merely to discover what you will not do: You must choose to do something...

...It is a glaring weakness of The Patriot that the novelist has left himself no means of coping with the fact that, were it not for America's entry into the war, Hitler would presumably have continued his genocide indefinitely...

...Unfortunately for that solemn thesis, his book belies Marilyn s brainyness, although not necessarily her comic genius (to mention intangible virtues only...

...The victim's shortcomings in making moral choices point to his limitations as the focus of drama...

...The effect is one of sheer terror...

...For even though The Patriot fails as a novel, it fails in trying to do what many modern writers feel compelled to do and what no one of them has yet successfully done: to elevate the victim into a hero...

...Reviewed by Jeremy Larner Contributor, "Dissent," "Partisan Review" THE HERO OF The Patriot volunteers for Navy combat-pilot training in World War II because his father and his society tell him it is right...

...Since the hero is passive, action has to be initiated from the outside, and events lack the logic which a fighting personality compels as his answer from the universe...

...Lacking a principle of selection, The Patriot is much too long and in many places overwritten...

...THE MARRIAGE OF Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe was so odd a mixture of libido and Liberalism that we have long believed it was invented at an editorial conference of the New York Post...

...Marilyn s biographer, however, says she had always dreamed of mating with someone like Arthur, being herself a girl of searching intellect and cultivated taste...

...The experience of the novel, the bulk of which is an expert account of the process by which men are systematically stripped of personality and turned into machine-killers, creates a drastic alienation in the hero and thereby saves him as a person at the same time it flunks him as an acceptable American patriot...

...Since he is not an intellectual and cannot by understanding come to terms with his unease, he is doomed to wander all alone in hell, wondering what's the matter with himself, a victim of every massive outrage and yet still unable to succumb...

...Too much of a novel's power depends on the hero's desire to make his own fate and choose his own choices...

...With a schlimazl in the center, The Patroit succumbs to a predictable looseness of form...