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Share“He was by nature bound to a style of excess. There were times when you would be fed-up with him, but if you could conceive of American culture of the past 50 years without Norman Mailer, you would find it a lot drearier.”
Courtesy: Achievement.org
So says EL Doctorow or Norman Mailer, who died this past weekend in New York City. The best of the obits can be found in the Los Angeles Times. Elaine Woo dissects Mailer’s varied images, from wunderkind to genius, giant to buffoon.
The Guardian positions Mailer as “the pugilist who wrote the story of America”, the Village Voice credits its co-founder, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution digs up a host of literary types to praise Mailer up, down, and sideways. John Mark Eberhart at the Kansas City Star remembers Mailer from the perspective of a fan rather than a colleague or simple observer.
I took [Ancient Evenings] home. The suffering began. This book was a photonegative of [The Executioner’s] Song, dull instead of fascinating, leaden instead of lively. Certainly the writing was good. Mailer just didn’t convince me to care about the story. Through the years, that would be my experience with Mailer; to read him was to be alternately vexed and dazzled.
It’s impossible, though, to know just what to think of Mailer, egocentric Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author who head-butted Gore Vidal and stabbed a lover at a party, based on these all-too-nice retrospectives. Check out the real Mailer for yourself over at Wired for Books. Don Swaim’s hour-long 1991 interview is most revealing.
