=Norman Mailer: The Extreme Left.= The voice of the extreme Left, rarely heard in recent American novels, sounded in Norman Mailer’s _Barbary Shore_, a murky mixture of obscure symbolism, endless conversation, and political theory disguised as dialogue. Published in 1951, the novel met with a generally unfavorable critical reception. A reading bears out this verdict. McLeod, apparently speaking for the author as his _raisonneur_, discusses what he calls revolutionary socialism at great length. Rejecting Russian Communism as state capitalism, McLoed’s two-thousand-word, non-stop lecture envisions a mutually destructive war between “the Colossi.” The Lenin of tomorrow, with the surviving theorists and proletariat, must be ready to spring to the barricades of the rubble-strewn “hundred Lilliputs” which survive. Before he is killed, McLoed passes his concept of Marxian revolutionary socialism like a Grail or a sword to Mikey Lovett. He is to keep it in readiness for the day when it can be used. This novel is intensely political. Despite its ambiguousness and withheld secrets, its essential point emerges: the first socialist revolution was betrayed; the true revolutionary socialism must make the second one successful. =Novels of the Cold War.= As wartime cooperation with the Russians was superseded by a growing awareness of the nature of militant Communism and the Moscow-oriented loyalties of American Communists, the novel chronicled this awakening. In _The Grand Design_ Paul Graves had told Millard Carroll that a Russian purchasing commission or a Russian-controlled political party meant “espionage and counter-espionage and counter-counterespionage ad infinitum....” Novels like Irwin Shaw’s _The Troubled Air_ (1951) and William Shirer’s _Stranger Come Home_ (1954) recorded the violence of this reaction. The function of these novels as political instruments was to rouse indignation against the forces which, in seeking to destroy American Communism, use methods as authoritarian and undemocratic as those of the Soviets themselves. Both novels enlist the reader’s sympathies on the side of loyal, non-Communist Americans who are unjustly attacked by self-appointed judges using lies and questionable methods. These courageous protagonists are virtually ruined professionally and economically, for their integrity forbids them salvation through conformity forced upon them by fanatical groups. _The Troubled Air_ embodies the problem in the efforts of director Clement Archer to keep his radio actors employed until they can defend themselves against charges of Communism made by _Blueprint_. This magazine, like some which have appeared on the American scene, specializes in allegations of Communist Party membership or sympathies on the part of entertainers. Archer’s actions, exceedingly dangerous to his own position through his lack of awareness of the nature of his opponents, cost him his job. This novel is less a _roman à clef_, more complex,