Our club was a bit divided on this one. Overall people liked the characters, and we experienced the frustration the characters do in the book, that war is a lot of sitting around and waiting for something to happen, but when it does happen, it is very intense and unsettling. We had great discussions of what this book was all about, what the characters choices were, who was a hero or a villain, and what Mailer was trying to say about war and society in the 1940s