I haven’t written about the death of Norman Mailer (pictured above from New York Times obit) yet, because I am still trying to come to grips with my opinions of him as a writer. I’ve read several of his books, mostly his nonfiction novels, and have had great difficulty getting through much of his fiction. He was, as “Advertisements for Myself” shows, a remarkable egomaniac and intellectual, one who would fight both physically and rhetorically for the things he believed (even if some of them, especially his disdain for feminism and feminists, completely contradicted his professed humanism).
Much of the writing about Mailer over the last few days has been fawning — some of it deserved, like this one from John Nichols (in which he mentions Mailer’s pointed attack on President Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” Moment — an earlier, prewar piece by Mailer also is worth reading).
Some of it, however, seems to gloss over the nasty edges of his character — for a deconstruction of this trend, read Steven Hart’s takes on Stevenhartsite and The Opinion Mill).
Mailer, as Hart writes, was a generational writer, meaning that his commitment to the novel and storytelling was formed during an earlier time when the novel was still deemed an important pursuit and postmodernism had not fractured storytelling (I say this not to criticize current writing, but only as an observation and description of the changing face of fiction writing). Mailer was committed to the big book, the Great American Novel, a noble pursuit that has fallen out of favor and probably was more a mythical enterprise anyway, sort of like the pursuit of the Holy Grail.
That Mailer’s big fiction books were mostly awful ultimately is not the point. His writing about 1967 Pentagon protest (“Armies of the Night”), the presidential conventions of 1968 and 1972 (“Miami and the Siege of Chicago” and “St. George and the Godfather”) and the Gary Gilmore execution (“The Executioner’s Song”) are brilliant forays into what was then a new genre of literature and among the best works the so-called New Journalism produced.
These nonfiction novels should secure his place in literary history — a place of ambivalence similar to the awkward perch he will occupy within the intellectual history of the American left.
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Hank Kalet 