I have just finished reading The Naked and the Dead-in Estonian! Even that did not suffice to create a little more of an exotic element to this tediously boring piece of junk literature. How on earth Mailer ever managed to be crowned as a literary figurehead in the US is beyond my reasonably educated understanding. I can appreciate Dickens going to the trouble of writing David Copperfield to the tune of 700-odd pages, but for Mailer to do the same is just criminal beyond words.