John McGowan
RedwoodAge.com
Like Joan Didion, Norman Mailer, who died Saturday, was a journalist who thought he should be a novelist. His novels are mostly forgettable, but for 15 years, from 1958 to 1973, he had his finger directly on America’s pulse.
His books on the national party conventions cover from the 1960 coronation of Kennedy in Los Angeles to Nixon’s launch of CREEP (the Committee to Re-elect the President of infamy and Watergate) in Miami in 1972. Each of these reports catches mad America’s political dreams and delusions on the hop.
And, in between, he wrote the best book about the '60s and the anti-war movement, "Armies of the Night," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969, and the best book on the space race, "Of A Fire on the Moon - 10 times better than Tom Wolfe’s more famous and much later "The Right Stuff."
Mailer’s style during those great years was manic, sprawling, and associative. The books are full of flights of fancy even as they give us hard facts about people and institutions.
Only a mixture of analysis and inspired imaginings could capture the spirit of a country always teetering on the edge of chaos, pulled one way by the criminality and foreign policy adventures of its rulers, and another by a utopian youth movement turned nihilistic.
Post-1973, the times passed Mailer by. He kept producing novels and took to making films, all of them interesting in places but failures in toto. Except for one, final, supreme triumph, "The Executioner’s Song," his endlessly fascinating reconstruction of the life of Gary Gilmore and his girlfriend, Nicole (who steals the book).
Written in a spare, terse style that is a radical departure from his usual mode, "The Executioner’s Song," which also won the Pulitzer Prize, is the fastest 1,000-page read you will ever have. It’s the place to start if you have never read Mailer before, or the one to start with if you want to revisit his work in memoriam.
