Pulitzer Prize (Fiction) (1980)
I wonder if all modern societies have the same tendency to fetishize
criminals as we do? Mailer after all is notorious for getting Jack
Abbott out of prison, only to have him stab a guy in a diner. William
F. Buckley, Mailer's long time nemesis, and a man who should have known
better, had his own pet criminal in the 70's. Seemingly half the
artists in America are trying to free the cop killer Mummia Abu-Jamal.
Republicans have G. Gordon Liddy and Ollie North. Democrats have
everyone from Clinton to the IRA to the PLO to FALN and so on. Of
course, the media culture is just drowning in criminals. We've got
OJ trials, the Ramseys, the killer Nanny, Andrew Cunanan, the Menendez
brothers, Columbine, etc. and etc. and etc. And that's just the real
people; never mind the fictional creations like Hannibal Lecter.
And we study them and advocate for them and argue about them as if they
were talismans or held some kind of secret knowledge that they could reveal
to us. In the end, perhaps it just boils down to a fascination with
evil.
Whatever the case, where The Executioner's Song may have once been a
compelling look into the world of a criminal and at the machinery of justice,
with the added cachet of the nation's first execution in decades, now it
all just seems so wearyingly familiar. Just take the execution angle,
not only is the death penalty no longer an issue, we actually live in a
country where a liberal Democrat running for President felt like it was
good politics to fly home from the campaign trail in order to execute a
retarded inmate. I'm afraid there's just no longer any dramatic tension
left in this story.
It is probably Mailer's one unarguably good book, but events have caught
up to it and rendered it little more than a mildly interesting anachronism.
And even using fictional techniques, it should not be considered a novel
and certainly should not have gotten a Pulitzer for Fiction.
(Reviewed:)
Grade: (B-)
Websites:
Norman Mailer Links:
-INTERVIEW: Norman Mailer Ruminates on Literature and Life (NY Times, 1/22/2003)
Book-related and General Links:
-ESSAY:
Discovering Jack H. Abbott (Norman Mailer, NY Review of Books)
-REVIEW:
Death for Sale (Diane Johnson, NY Review of Books)
-ESSAY:
Norman Mailer, Gary Gilmore, and the Untold Stories of the Law (Simon
Petch, Australian Humanities Review)
-Norman
Mailer: State Author 1991-1993 (NY State Writers Institute)
-REVIEW:
of IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST Letters from Prison. By Jack Henry Abbott.
Introduction by Norman Mailer. (Terrence Des Pres, NY Times Book Review)
-At
Random Magazine: Norman Mailer
-The
Revolution in Journalism with an Emphasis on the 1960's and 1970's
(Belinda Carberry)
-ESSAY:
It is absurd to claim that men are the real victims of oppression
'It was always odd that Norman Mailer became so inextricably identified
with the sexual revolution' (Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Independent UK)
-Great
Expectations: Why is Norman Mailer still Famous? (Terry Teachout,
National Review)
-Twilight
of the Old Goats--Mailer, Roth and Bellow refuse to go quietly
(D.T. MAX, Salon)
-Beat
the Devil (LOUIS MENAND, NY Review of Books)
-Keeping
Up With Norman Mailer (THOMAS R. EDWARDS , NY Review of Books)
-REVIEW:
of Mailer: A Biography By Mary V. Dearborn A Frank Look at a
Literary Giant
(Steve Weinberg,
Iron Minds)
-REVIEW
ESSAY: THE REANIMATORS: On the art of literary graverobbing (Jonathan
Dee, Harper's Magazine, June 1999)
Discussed in this essay:
The Hours, by Michael Cunningham.
The Executioner's Song, by Norman Mailer
Ragtime, by E. L. Doctorow
Libra, by Don DeLillo
The Public Burning, by Robert Coover
I Was Amelia Earhart, by Jane Mendelsohn
John Wayne: A Novel, by Dan Barden
The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald
Arrogance, by Joanna Scott
The Master of Petersburg, by J. M. Coetzee
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