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The first half of The Executioner's Song, Mailer's massive journalistic tome about Gary Gilmore, is very good and has been influential on both crime writers and journalists since. It's written in a very affectless, blank style with a new paragraph for virtually every sentence and frequent page breaks so the information you're given about Gary's childhood, his teenage crimes, his unsuccessful attempts to break the cycle and his murders is left hanging in the air, nothing given any more weight than anything else. There's no moral judgement and the conclusions the reader comes to are formed in the gutters, the whiteness between the words. It's very different to the high style of The Armies Of The Night and perfectly suited to its subject. The second half of the book is less compelling; partly because of the film producer Mailer uses as a focus character but more because we've already seen the tragedy unfold. You know why Gary chooses death and even sympathise with him.
I remember some bits of An American Dream fondly but it was pretty overwrought. Why Are We In Vietnam? was a product of the 1960s that felt like Kerouac in the 50s. And though I was always intrigued by Harlot's Ghost and Ancient Evenings I've read neither and can't really face it now. (Mailer was convinced that the Great American Novel would be a long one.)
Ultimately I think Mailer's journalism is more likely to survive than his novels. He was the man on the spot journalistically, a writer at the heart of it all, and those books and pieces are valuable first-hand accounts. You have to know the man to make sense of most of them, but that's a given with primary sources. You also have to know the man to make sense of the novels, and that's an area where fewer people will bother. |
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