"American scene" despite any of D.J.'s shortcomings. In summary, Glenn writes: "Why Are We in Vietnam works splendidly as a metaphor for the way things are now." Christopher Lehman-Haupt takes up Mailer's own intimations of comparisons to the work to James Joyce, and finds WWVN wanting. He laments the book's stilted dialogue and thinly veiled devices as heavy-handed and polemical, arguing that subtleties and verisimilitude are compromised in order for Mailer to plow through to his true ends-an indictment of modern America's greed, blundering, bloody-thirsty war mongering and overreliance on psychoanalysis and technology. Despite what Lehman-Haupt assesses to be Mailer's rather ham-handed, over-extended metaphors, the critic still concedes that WWVN is compelling because, even if D.J. and his hunting companions are little more than three-dimensional marionettes for their creator's manifesto, at least the characters' obtrusive pupeteer is a writer with enough passion, strong ideas and talent to make the novel worthwhile. In his review in 1967, Broyard uses his article's name A Disturbance of the Peace to describe WWVN. The novel could also be seen as "a sexual obstacle course in the basic training camp of contemporary life." He finds D.J., a sexual hero or an insignificant hero, to be random in his speech. His thoughts are filled with "portmanteau puns" in one moment, and in the next moment "he slips . . . into Negro dialect". Broyard concludes his article by stating that Mailer's novel is a "third-rate work of art" but a "first-rate outrage to our sensibilities". In Robert Begiebing's Acts of Regeneration, he views Mailer's WWVN as his most economical narrative.He says that the novel may be Mailer's expression of his own "sense of defeat by the catastrophic events of the late sixties and an admission of his helplessness and failure before those events."This sense of defeat is shown through the character DJ in the novel which Begiebing says is the defeated hero in the novel.Begiebing considers DJ the defeated hero because of "his guilt that he feels about the wastes of his past, both the wastes of his life as the son of a corporation chief and the wastes of his father's safari two years ago." ReferencesCitationsBibliography''' External links 1967 American novels Novels by Norman Mailer Novels set during the Vietnam War Books by Norman Mailer Novels set in Alaska