Mailer, Norman Books

The Naked and the Dead: 50th Anniversary Edition

Norman Mailer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 73 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Helprin meets Hemingway, But Better [51][80] 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 6 people found this review helpful.

At 25, Mailer's insightful yarn about a World War II battleground shows how precocious and mature his writing skills were at that young age. After having personally lived two years in that same war, maybe Mailer - like many of the characters in the book - arrived as a boy and left as a man. But, unlike his characters, we know he was extremely literate and given a gift to write.

In college, Mailer claims to have written a lot - over 250,000 words. And, all before the age of computers, easy editing, and electric typewriters. This book, approximately 210,000 words, was amazingly completed with ribbons, manual returns and hand corrections in a period of 15 months.

Painstaking detail to the accounts of the 10-person unit enables the reader to feel the anguish and boredom often entailed among enlisted men. We enter their torpid minds sodden by the Japanese rains and febrile from the metallic heat, and learn why these drones constantly reject the authority of the commissioned as well noncommissioned officers who outrank them. The dichotomy existing in the military ranks is obvious. But, everyone puts one pant leg on at a time, we're all flesh and blood, we all are nothing special in the larger realm, or as one character (Red) says, "There damn sure ain't nothing special about a man if he can smell as bad as he does when he's dead."

In addition,behind closed doors, we witness the private life of the general overseeing all of them. His self hatred swells so greatly that he actually seeks defilade in war from his oppressive wife and home life.

Contrasted to the extremely thorough prose about the few weeks on the Japanese island, Mailer gives each main character a brief 9-12 page "life's story" - but not as a rendition, but instead laid out as a weave of few life-changing events, or discussions or both. These mini-biographies are all amazingly detailed in such cleverly simple delivery - very similar to Hemingway's best.

But, the greatest aspect of his book is the creation of the main characters' dialogue. Unlike other great writers, whose dialogue uses spellings and juxtaposed grammar to catch the accent and flavor of the region's "patois", Mailer has a vast number of accents to work from and deliver. Texas, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Massachusetts, prep school, Chicago, Brooklyn, Mexican and others are all brilliantly depicted dialogues in this book. To be capable of creating such diverse accents is amazing. To deliver such amazing diverse dialogues at 25 is almost incomprehensible.

By the end, like any war story, we learn to love those who die and learn to hate some who live. Boys will be boys and some will never "do the right thing." And, sometimes it is the "good who die young." And, luckily, sometimes the good writers live, come home, rethink what horrors they just lived through, apply their God-given writing skills to such memories and deliver a book which will justly last for generations.

Editorial Review:

Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of the Second World War, The Naked and the Dead received unprecedented critical acclaim upon its publication and has since become part of the American canon. This fiftieth anniversary edition features a new introduction created especially doe the occasion by Norman Mailer.

Written in gritty, journalistic detail, the story follows an army platoon of foot soldiers who are fighting for the possession of the Japanese-held island of Anopopei. Composed in 1948, The Naked and the Dead is representative of the best in twentieth-century American writing.

The Executioner's Song

Norman Mailer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 77 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

If there is art here, then I am glad I missed it 1 out of 5 stars.
2 of 6 people found this review helpful.

Except for classical or historical novels, I admit that I am not much of a fiction reader. I picked this book up only because Norman Mailer wrote it and because he is understood to be one of America's foremost writer's of fiction. I had read a book by him about Lee Harvey Oswald and was so unimpressed that I have now forgotten its title. It was supposed to be non-fiction, but appeared to me to be anything but.

Anyway, this book was my attempt to give Mailer another chance. It is of course about the brief period of freedom and then the ignominious death by firing squad of one, Gary Mark Gilmore. Charitably, Gilmore can at best be described as the "scum of the earth," having spent most of his life in, rather than out of prison, from crimes as petty as liquor store heists, up to murder.

Whatever literary value this book is supposed to have had, in my mind at least, was lost and over-shadowed by the wanton, random, and utter senselessness and brutality of the murders he committed before he was finally recaptured and executed.

This, his last chance at freedom, was squandered like the rest of his life. Gilmore proved that he was not able to handle life on the outside because he had no idea how to go about it. Unlike his structured life inside, his life outside of prison had no rhyme or reason. What he knew how to do was to create chaos wherever he went.

During his freedom, he was like the ball in a pinball machine, randomly bouncing along a downward obstacle course of life, where he hoped to be able to ring a few bells, hit a few bright lights and make a few noises before the lights were finally turned out on him for good. It seems that the script for the ending of his life had already been written: by him at birth. His life was an existential black hole, without hope.

Somehow, Mailer tried to turn this foreordained tragedy into a love story between Gilmore and "a trailer park loser" named Nicole, but in my view it all was mostly a literary contrivance. This was not a story of hope: from the beginning, we knew there would be only a fiery ending to this saga. All that was left to do was to tie up the loose ends.

The die sending Gilmore's life on its inexorable downward trajectory had already been cast. Instead of "Mark," "tragedy" should have been Gilmore's middle name. Everything he touched turned to death and then to dust. He was, always the walking dead: A zombie brought back to life by Mailer's literary tricks.

Even when he emerged from prison, all of his lifelines, as well as his nine lives, had been used up. He stood face-to-face with the existential precipice: It was "over-the-cliff" for him, and the sooner the better. Did anyone really think that Gary Mark Gilmore was going to live out the rest of his lost freedom and life as a gas station attendant? Better to go out in a blaze of ignominious glory. Which is what he did. Hell, even I could write that story?

The only tension left for the artist to resolve was how many innocent souls would become the victim of this human wrecking ball. If it takes skill to resolve that dilemma, then leave me out. All I can see is the pain of those who died at his senseless hands. If there is art here I am glad I missed it.

One star

Editorial Review:

The Executioner's Song is a work of unprecedented force. It is the true story of Gary Gilmore, who in 1977 became the first person executed in the United States since the reinstitution of the death penalty. Gilmore, a violent yet articulate man who chose not to fight his death-penalty sentence, touched off a national debate about capital punishment. He allowed Norman Mailer and researcher Lawrence Schiller complete access to his story. Mailer took the material and produced an immense book with a dry, unwavering voice and meticulous attention to detail on Gilmore's life--particularly his relationship with Nicole Baker, whom Gilmore claims to have killed. What unfolds is a powerful drama, a distorted love affair, and a chilling look into the mind of a murderer in his countdown with a firing squad.

The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History

Norman Mailer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Great style, but is it really a novel in any sense? 4 out of 5 stars.
15 of 19 people found this review helpful.

I'm not going to try to answer my own question. I will say that this is an interesting look at the 67 march from Mailer's perspective. The section on the development of the march itself and the organizers was very informative, as was the section entitled "Why are we in Vietnam?" (a clear reference to Mailer's previous novel, which was criticized for not answering the question clearly enough.

The analysis of the changing liberalism in the US is also quite good. Overall, there is no plot. And Mailer's attempts to avoid even the most minor suffering are laughable especially when held against the suffering of the Vietnamese and the US soldiers enlisted to fight a meandering war.

Reading the book in 2005, however, gives the book great significance. It's clear that liberals write books and conservatives work in politics. And unfortunately, neither side listens to the other very closely.

Mailer's style in this book is very fast and pulled me through the first section quickly. Things slow down in the second section, but not because the subject matter is slower. Mailer clearly wanted to switch styles (and even talks about how he prides himself on changing styles with every work).

Anyway. Enjoy it for the connections to 2005 America, but remember that Mailer is...Mailer. And he loves to talk about himself and how important he is to everyone around him.

Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery

Norman Mailer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"MARVELOUS . . . BREATHTAKING."
--The New York Times Book Review
"MAILER SHINES . . . Explaining Kennedy's assassination through the flaws in Oswald's character has been attempted before, notably by Gerald Posner in Case Closed and Don Delillo in Libra. But neither handled Oswald with the kind of dexterity and literary imagination that Mailer here supplies in great force. . . . Oswald's Tale weaves a story not only about Oswald or Kennedy's death but about the culture surrounding the assassination, one that remains replete with miscomprehensions, unraveled threads and lack of resolution: All of which makes Oswald's Tale more true-to-life than any fact-driven treatise could hope to be. . . . Vintage Mailer."
--The Philadelphia Inquirer
"FASCINATING . . . A MASTER STORYTELLER . . . Mailer gives us our clearest, deepest view of Oswald yet. . . . Inside three pages you are utterly absorbed."
--Detroit Free Press
"MAILER AT HIS BEST . . . LIVELY AND CONVINCING . . . EXTREMELY
LUCID . . . Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance. . . . [He] has found a way to make the dry bones of KGB tapes and his own interviews stand up and perform. . . . From the American master conjurer of dark and swirling purpose, a moving reflection."
--Robert Stone
The New York Review of Books
"THIS IS A NARRATIVE OF TREMENDOUS ENERGY AND PANACHE; THE AUTHOR AT THE TOP OF HIS FORM."
--Christopher Hitchens
Financial Times
"Mailer has written some pretty crazy books in his time, but this isn't one of them. Like its predecessor, Harlot's Ghost, it is the performance of an author relishing the force and reach of his own acuity."
--Martin Amis
The London Sunday Times

Nobody Knows My Name

James Baldwin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

More Notes of a Native Son 4 out of 5 stars.
7 of 7 people found this review helpful.

Bearing the subtitle "More Notes of a Native Son," "Nobody Knows My Name" is a follow-up to Baldwin's earlier, more famous book. Originally published in national magazines between 1954 and 1961, these essays are more mature, if less biting, than his first collection--and they are certainly just as witty. With one notable exception, they are timeless and trenchant commentaries on racial and cultural issues.

The first group of eight essays focuses on the political and social divides in the United States. The opening article reiterates the discovery he made in "Notes of a Native Son": that by living in Europe he paradoxically discovered what it means to be an American. Others examine the despicable inhumanity of a Harlem public housing project ("cheerless as a prison"), the success of the student movement and the rise of Muslim power in black politics ("a very small echo of the black discontent now abroad in the world"), and the first efforts to integrate Southern public schools ("the entire nation has spent a hundred years avoiding the question of the place of the black man in it"). The two most memorable essays detail the daily bravery, trauma, and humiliations of a schoolboy who is the first black in an all-white school and respond to Faulkner's despicable remarks on race (which were made when Faulkner was seemingly drunk and which were later repudiated when he was atypically sober).

The only disappointing essay is "Princes and Power," an account of Le Congres des Ecrivains et Artistes Noirs (Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists). The internal disputes and lofty goals of this gathering--convened to consider "the history of Euro-African relations" and the postcolonial "cultural inventory"--did not lack for interest, and Baldwin ably relates the tensions between and cross-purposes of American blacks and Africans. But, overall, he seems to be just phoning it in, muffling the obvious passions of the conference participants and highlighting instead the abstract academic tone.

The second and final group of five essays highlight cultural subjects. He follows a speech detailing the outline for an imaginary novel with biographical appraisals of Andre Gide, Ingmar Bergman, Richard Wright, and Normal Mailer. His eulogy for Wright, initially composed and published in three disparate parts, simultaneously expresses regret for Baldwin's youthful criticism of the older author that resulted in the irreparable destruction of their friendship and recounts Wright's sad social decline: "he had managed to estrange himself from almost all of the younger American Negro writers in Paris ... [who] had discovered that Richard did not really know much about the present dimensions and complexity of the Negro problem here, and, profoundly, did not want to know."

But the gem of the collection is "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy," Wright's tongue-in-cheek account of his friendship with Normal Mailer, written both as not-so-subtle payback for Mailer's criticism of Baldwin in the self-indulgent "Advertisements for Myself" and as a tribute to Mailer's talent and "responsibility" as an artist. After sending off a number of barbed (yet good-natured) repartees, Baldwin acknowledges not only Mailer's importance as a "very good friend" but also his worth as a writer. Baldwin's assessment of that career serves at as fitting coda to Baldwin's own essays: "His work, after all, is all that will be left when the newspapers are yellowed, all the gossip columnists silenced, and all the cocktail parties over, and when Norman and you and I are dead."

Editorial Review:

Told with Baldwin's characteristically unflinching honesty, this collection of illuminating, deeply felt essays examines topics ranging from race relations in the United States to the role of the writer in society, and offers personal accounts of Richard Wright, Norman Mailer and other writers.

The Castle in the Forest: A Novel

Norman Mailer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 67 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

No career in modern American letters is at once so brilliant, varied, and controversial as that of Norman Mailer. In a span of more than six decades, Mailer has searched into subjects ranging from World War II to Ancient Egypt, from the march on the Pentagon to Marilyn Monroe, from Henry Miller and Mohammad Ali to Jesus Christ. Now, in The Castle in the Forest, his first major work of fiction in more than a decade, Mailer offers what may be his consummate literary endeavor: He has set out to explore the evil of Adolf Hitler.

The narrator, a mysterious SS man who is later revealed to be an exceptional presence, gives us young Adolf from birth, as well as Hitler’s father and mother, his sisters and brothers, and the intimate details of his childhood and adolescence.

A tapestry of unforgettable characters, The Castle in the Forest delivers its playful twists and surprises with astonishing insight into the nature of the struggle between good and evil that exists in us all. At its core is a hypothesis that propels this novel and makes it a work of stunning originality. Now, on the eve of his eighty-fourth birthday, Norman Mailer may well be saying more than he ever has before.


From the Hardcover edition.

Advertisements for Myself

Norman Mailer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Fantastic, grotesque, extraordinary book. 4 out of 5 stars.
11 of 13 people found this review helpful.

Originally appearing in 1959, "Advertisements for Myself" remains one of the most unusual books ever published by a novelist. Containing stories, essays, reviews, interviews, novel excerpts and poems, all with detailed, italicized annotations courtesy of the author, this book displays a massive, raging talent assessing itself and the world around it. It is sometimes poignant, sometimes maddening, but never less than compelling. I love this book.

Today, Mailer's reputation is rather up in the air. To me, his career is an example of an artist constantly pushing himself, writing with breathtaking ambition even if it exceeded his skill. There has never been another writer like Norman Mailer, and it is touching to read here of his desire to write a novel on the level of Dostoyevsky, Mann and Tolstoy, and to read his pithy, sometimes hilarious assessments of his contemporaries. His commentary on the ups and downs of his career and his disgust and sadness about the decline of American literature are illuminating, but his self-aggrandizement and egocentricity are often difficult to stomach. However, one has to stand in awe at the monument of his talent and his passion.

Reading this book today, one has to ask, "Did he fulfill his expectations?" I think so. "Harlot's Ghost," "Ancient Evenings," "The Executioner's Song" and numerous other works, both fiction and nonfiction, will endure, in my opinion. But I, for one, would like to know whatever happened to the self-promoted masterpiece of a novel he excerpts here. The small sections make for very stimulating reading.

All in all, "Advertisements for Myself" is a required text for everyone who loves great literature or aspires to write it for themselves.

Editorial Review:

Originally published in 1959, Advertisements for Myself is an inventive collection of stories, essays, polemic, meditations, and interviews. It is Mailer at his brilliant, provocative, outrageous best. Emerging at the height of "hip," Advertisements is at once a chronicle of a crucial era in the formation of modern American culture and an important contribution to the great autobiographical tradition in American letters.

Harlot's Ghost: A Novel

Norman Mailer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 45 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A Long Time Getting There.... 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

There is a pretty good 600 to 700 page novel in here. Unfortunately, this opus is 1300 plus pages so you can guess that I found a lot of excess in Harlot's Ghost. Frankly, there are reams of it, and a lot of it is pretty tough sledding to get through.

Before his passing, Norman Mailer cited Harlot's Ghost as one of the 5 or so novels he was proudest of and considered his best work. I can understand his pride because he had obviously done a prodigious amount of research for the novel and throughout the book you have the sense that he got a lot of the spycraft and the inner workings of the CIA right. He also caught the very WASPy air of the early CIA and its founders and practioners, and he recreated the Cold War mindset quite well. As I said, there is a very good book within this encyclopedic epic.

But there is an awful lot of rubbish too. I found all the frabba jabba about the Alpha and Omega theory to be silly. I found pages upon pages of elaboration that neither moved the story along nor offered any pertinent insights or interest. I found the object of our hero's romantic affection, Kitteridge, not very interesting, and many of their letters (which form a substantial part of the book) overdone, and overly precious.

The book finally picks up interest in the last quarter with its sometimes gossipy-but-accurate, anecdote-laden recitation of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Kennedy brothers, Castro, and the CIA characters involved. Having just read the history of the CIA in Legacy of Ashes, I thought Mailer fleshed all of this out quite well and entertainingly.

I am glad I finally forced myself to persevere in working through this monster, for in the end I found it a worthwhile read, although I wonder if some of my satisfaction is simply the fact that I finished the damn thing; but no, there was much that was quite good. I just found the jewel that is in there is buried amongst a ton of well-researched, but often extraneous and boring detail. Detail became filler. No, it wasn't the length of the book (I've read War in Peace twice and never felt that a single page could be cut), it was just an awful lot of the book spent a tremendous amount of verbiage to little effect.

Undeterred however, I am about to tackle Mailer's Ancient Evenings which looks to be another long haul. I'll let you know.

Editorial Review:

"The most daring, ambitious and by far the best written of the several very long, daring and ambitious books Norman Mailer has so far produced....Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book....There can no longer be any doubt that he possesses the largest mind and imagination at work in American literature today."
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Narrated by Harry Hubbard, a second-generation CIA man, HARLOT'S GHOST looks into the depths of the American soul and the soul of Hugh Tremont Montague, code name Harlot, a CIA man obsessed. And Harry is about to discover how far the madness will go and what it means to the Agency and the country....
A Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club

The Fight

Norman Mailer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

My first influence as a writer; I'm sad as I write this. 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful.

Norman Mailer died today. He was my first and maybe largest influence as a writer. (Those who admire and dislike my books have often compared my voice to Mailer's.) THE FIGHT was my introduction to Mailer. It's certainly among the best writing about Ali and about the act of boxing. I wish I'd made the opportunity to tell Mailer of his influence on me. And, heck, I wish I'd had the chance to box with him.

I'm sad this afternoon. I'll miss this outsized, ridiculous, singularly talented person.

Davis Miller (author of THE TAO OF MUHAMMAD ALI, THE ZEN OF MUHAMMAD ALI AND OTHER OBSESSIONS, THE TAO OF BRUCE LEE: A MARTIAL ARTS MEMOIR)

Editorial Review:

There are sporting events that transcend the world of sports, and the 1974 heavyweight title fight in which Muhammad Ali regained his crown by improbably kayoing George Foreman in the middle of the African night was certainly one of them. Metaphorically, it was a writer's dream: two imposing black warriors, one all grace, the other brute force, one the iconoclast, the other the blind patriot, battling each other. Fatefully, the appropriate writer threw his pen into the ring. Norman Mailer's masterful account goes far beyond the ropes to capture the primal ethos of the sport, the larger social canvas this particular fight was drawn on, and the remarkable cast of personalities--not the least of which is Mailer himself--who converged to make this "Rumble in the Jungle" a landmark in sports history and a clear knockout in Mailer's journalistic portfolio.

An American Dream

Norman Mailer

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Total reviews: 31 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Stephen Rojack is a decorated war hero, a former Congressman, and a certified public intellectual with his own television show. He is also married to the very rich, very beautiful, and utterly amoral Deborah Caughlin Kelly. But one night, in the prime of his existence, he hears the moon talking to him on the terrace of a fashionable New York high-rise, and it is urging him to kill himself. It is almost as a defense against that infinitely seductive voice that Rojack murders his wife.

In this wild battering ram of a novel, which was originally published to vast controversy in 1965, Norman Mailer creates a character who might be a fictional precursor of the philosopher-killer he would later profile in The Executioner's Song. As Rojack runs amok through the city in which he was once a privileged citizen, Mailer peels away the layers of our social norms to reveal a world of pure appetite and relentless cruelty. Sensual, horrifying, and informed by a vision that is one part Nietzsche, one part de Sade, and one part Charlie Parker, An American Dream grabs the reader by the throat and refuses to let go.