The head of my writing program once told a story that started with a description of bull fighting and ended with Norman Mailer try to learn to walk on a tight rope in my professor’s backyard. Even then, Mailer was more a name to drop than a writer to recommend.
If alive today, Norman Mailer would love that this debate has rescued him from three decades of irrelevance. Novels, journalism, movies, politics... mostly his aim was fame. He was the ultimate troll, who used both virtue signaling & misogyny / homophobia / racism to get under the spotlight. We spent two years researching Mailer for a ten-part series podcast about him and fellow criminal writers Jack Henry Abbott and Jerzy Kosinski. You can hear all about it on penknifepodcast.com.
Penis-writing is generally going out of vogue these days, and a good job that! Some of this is the direct result of feminism. More of it is the final death of Freud. (Was that around 1980 or so?) A number of other authors are going to go the same way as Mailer.
I read "A Fire On The Moon" as it happened in Life magazine and even then I thought it was a pile of self-indulgent twaddle, with Mailer shoving himself into the narrative, such as it was, under the sobriquet "Aquarius" -- as in "Age Of Aquarius", get it? get it?? GET IT??? -- minutely interposing self-inflicted domestic drama amidst the lines of a far more interesting tale.
That Mailer was an asshole: sure. That his writing was uneven and often bloated with self-regard: absolutely. That he was over-rated: ok.
But I'd argue that four of his novels stand the test of time (and, indeed, offer deeper social critiques than any of his journalism.)
As Joan Didion put it in her review of one of them in 1979, taking up the strange critique that Mailer had failed because he had never written the "big book" (the quest for this kind of literary production being one of the weird tropes of 20th century American letters): "In fact he has written this "big book" at least three times now. He wrote it the first time in 1955 with "The Deer Park" and he wrote it a second time in 1963 with "An American Dream" and he wrote it a third time in 1967 with "Why Are We in Vietnam?" and now, with "The Executioner's Song," he has probably written it a fourth."
Each of these four books is problematic in a different way but each aimed at and chronicled and destroyed some of the bs of dominant American culture. There's value in that.
I read 'Ancient Evenings' by Norman Mailer in the 1990s, and don't remember it in detail, but my lasting impression was that it was a dull read despite its plot intricacies because it seemed formulaic and desperate to be a profound commentary on what by then was a 20 year old cultural allegorical narrative. It took a couple of months to finish because I could only slowly peck away at it with far less ardor and dedication than my grad school homework.
I've never read any of his other books, but I may consider reading 'White Negro' out of historical curiosity. In my opinion he's not interesting enough to be cancelled or lauded, he's just a relic (or a symptom) of his era.
The head of my writing program once told a story that started with a description of bull fighting and ended with Norman Mailer try to learn to walk on a tight rope in my professor’s backyard. Even then, Mailer was more a name to drop than a writer to recommend.
If alive today, Norman Mailer would love that this debate has rescued him from three decades of irrelevance. Novels, journalism, movies, politics... mostly his aim was fame. He was the ultimate troll, who used both virtue signaling & misogyny / homophobia / racism to get under the spotlight. We spent two years researching Mailer for a ten-part series podcast about him and fellow criminal writers Jack Henry Abbott and Jerzy Kosinski. You can hear all about it on penknifepodcast.com.
Penis-writing is generally going out of vogue these days, and a good job that! Some of this is the direct result of feminism. More of it is the final death of Freud. (Was that around 1980 or so?) A number of other authors are going to go the same way as Mailer.
I read "A Fire On The Moon" as it happened in Life magazine and even then I thought it was a pile of self-indulgent twaddle, with Mailer shoving himself into the narrative, such as it was, under the sobriquet "Aquarius" -- as in "Age Of Aquarius", get it? get it?? GET IT??? -- minutely interposing self-inflicted domestic drama amidst the lines of a far more interesting tale.
Excellent commentary on a complex writer.
That Mailer was an asshole: sure. That his writing was uneven and often bloated with self-regard: absolutely. That he was over-rated: ok.
But I'd argue that four of his novels stand the test of time (and, indeed, offer deeper social critiques than any of his journalism.)
As Joan Didion put it in her review of one of them in 1979, taking up the strange critique that Mailer had failed because he had never written the "big book" (the quest for this kind of literary production being one of the weird tropes of 20th century American letters): "In fact he has written this "big book" at least three times now. He wrote it the first time in 1955 with "The Deer Park" and he wrote it a second time in 1963 with "An American Dream" and he wrote it a third time in 1967 with "Why Are We in Vietnam?" and now, with "The Executioner's Song," he has probably written it a fourth."
Each of these four books is problematic in a different way but each aimed at and chronicled and destroyed some of the bs of dominant American culture. There's value in that.
Who today remembers Executioner's Song as something besides an X-Men crossover
Me.
Me three.
I read 'Ancient Evenings' by Norman Mailer in the 1990s, and don't remember it in detail, but my lasting impression was that it was a dull read despite its plot intricacies because it seemed formulaic and desperate to be a profound commentary on what by then was a 20 year old cultural allegorical narrative. It took a couple of months to finish because I could only slowly peck away at it with far less ardor and dedication than my grad school homework.
I've never read any of his other books, but I may consider reading 'White Negro' out of historical curiosity. In my opinion he's not interesting enough to be cancelled or lauded, he's just a relic (or a symptom) of his era.