Slate's Bizbox
obit: Bringing out the dead.

The Pugilist at RestNorman Mailer's performance comes to a close.

By Jim Lewis
Posted Monday, Nov. 12, 2007, at 2:11 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Thirty books in 60 years is a relentless, punishing schedule; it would be hard on a shut-in, it must have been brutal on Mailer, and a lot of things got broken along the way. Marriages, for example, and friendships: more than a few of each. A lot of barriers got broken, too, between fiction and nonfiction, between public and private life, between genius and idiocy. And this one, which I'm not sure anyone's noticed: Mailer was the first great Jewish American novelist who didn't feel obliged to write about Jews. His only real precedent was Nathanael West (born Nathan Weinstein), but West was not a colossal enough figure to start a new practice. Mailer was, and since his heyday there have been two traditions: One is inward-looking, cerebral and high-strung, and it includes Bellow, Roth, and Malamud, with Jonathan Safran Foer bringing up the rear. The other is outward-looking and somewhat more violent, and it includes Mailer himself, David Mamet, and perhaps Richard Price—none of whom, coincidentally or not, have Jewish last names (as I myself do not). I wouldn't say the first tradition was a ghetto or that the second is a betrayal, but I do think the freedom to choose between them (or mix them at will) is a gift, and it came from Mailer.

He was also a first-rate aphorist—a minor skill, but one that can outlast whole books' worth of prose. His notorious essay "Evaluations—Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room," in which he quickly demolishes some of the most beloved of his contemporaries, is vain, vicious, profoundly unfair, and more often right than wrong. His account of how he makes his novels—"I start with the idea of constructing a treehouse and end with a skyscraper made of wood"—remains one of the most accurate descriptions of the process I've ever encountered. And he said this: "Sometime I think the novelist fashions a totem just as much as an aesthetic and that his real aim, not even known necessarily to himself, is to create a diversion in the fields of dread." And this: "The idea could even be advanced that style comes to young authors about the time they recognize that life is also ready to injure them." (A typical Mailer bon mot: an impeccable thought and an elegant formulation, preceded by seven words of needless mush.) And he said this, which is perfect: "Something out there is not necessarily fooling."

Yes, and Mailer was not necessarily fooling, either. He wasn't fooling when he wrote Why Are We in Vietnam?, which for all its madness and Grand Guignol is a brilliant novel, and one I hope is still being read, now that we are in Iraq. He wasn't fooling when he wrote Harlot's Ghost—a novel that no one, alas, seems to have noticed at all. He certainly wasn't fooling when he wrote The Executioner's Song, which is as close to perfect as a book gets and will remain one of the permanent American novels of the last century. (I'm perfectly happy to let his own description of it, as a "true life novel," stand unchallenged, in large part because it pisses off both journalists, who don't write as well as Mailer did, and novelists, who are seldom handed such rich material to work with.) From the enormous welter of Lawrence Schiller's reporting, Mailer shaped a flawless and monumental narrative: a great love story, a terrifying crime novel, and a symphony of American voices, all wrapped into one. Among massive 20th-century American novels, its only competition is The Adventures of Augie March.

If we are to make literature into a horse race (as Mailer himself compulsively did), I'd have to say Bellow was a better writer. But I'll miss Mailer more. There's no one like him around anymore, no one as fearless who isn't playing to a constituency, no one taking the risks he took. A great writer—like a great boxer, actually—chooses his fights carefully, something Mailer never really learned how to do. But he fought with all he had, and he wasn't fooling.

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Jim Lewis is the author of three novels, most recently, The King Is Dead.
Photograph of Normal Mailer by Carl Van Vechten/Library of Congress.
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Remarks from the Fray

I have yet to read any comments about Norman Mailer since his passing that have mentioned his recent abandonment of atheism and adoption of a belief in God. This was not a sudden transformation and is not surprising to anyone who has read his novel, The Gospel of Jesus according to the Son. Like many serious thinkers, Mailer had many wide interests as a writer which have led many critics to chastise him for squandering his talent with a casual approach to writing. Like a musician having fun in a jam session, Mailer enjoyed writing on the surface of things as well as probing the depths, often in lyrical and metaphysical ways. Sure, he wrote about Marilyn Monroe and boxing. But my appreciation of Mailer began just after the Challenger space shuttle tragedy of 1986 when I read Of A Fire on the Moon, a journalistic meditation on the earlier Apollo space program and the landing of Americans on the moon. In that account, Mailer's prose tried to match the awesome technological feat of putting a man on the moon with a literary style of dazzling, dizzying, and detailed command of language, facts, and psychic intuition into the meaning of space exploration and aeronautical engineering. For a man who wanted to write the great American novel and who wrote about his fantasy of winning the Nobel Prize for literature, Mailer certainly excelled as a non-fiction writer, too.

--Readrite59

(To reply, click here)

As soon as I read Lewis' last paragraphs about the dearth of risk-takers in fiction writing, I immediately thought JEANETTE WINTERSON (yes, the name appeared in my head in all caps). Then I thought of some other great contemporary Brits: Julian Barnes, Penelope Lively, Graham Swift. All of them risk-takers. Their works are postmodern, yet they contain the passion that is often missing from postmodern writers.

What do the rest of you think? Are the British novelists of the last 30 years or so the great risk-takers of our time? Or is there sufficient evidence in this country that risk-taking is not dead with (e.g. Dave Eggers, Mark Danielewski, Toni Morrison, etc.)?

--gummybrain

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(11/14)

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