How this won the Pulitzer prize is truly beyond my comprehension.

It is bloated, dull, and nowhere near as good as the amazing In Cold Blood by Truman Capote. I felt sickened and angry for almost the entire duration of reading this piece of garbage.

How people could love this vile, ordinary killer is beyond me. He callously killed two men, depriving wives of their husbands and children of their fathers. Yet, people are more concerned about whether he is comfortable before his execution. Are you kidding me? What about the men he murdered? Were they comfortable?

And the journalist, Schiller, whose opinion of Nicole changed simply because she was pretty. Apparently, this meant that her relationship with Gilmore wasn't sordid, but had some meaning. Give me a break.

There is way too much detail, and very little of it is even remotely interesting. I can't believe I endured reading over 1000 pages of this drivel.

It's a disappointment and a waste of time.

I don't want to write about this book. I just want YOU to read it.

From what I know, it is Mailer's best book. His research was truly exhaustive. He logged hundreds of hours of in-person interviews, scoured the annals of Utah's legal proceedings, and restrained himself from clogging the story with stentorious moral opinions. Seriously, you would think Norman Maidstone Mailer were a tenured Harvard history professor. Norman Mailer's probity is astonishing and yet underappreciated.

BUT, Norman Mailer is first and foremost a storyteller. And one could not chisel this endless fable into a more beautiful, elegant, well-paced and sublime epic than he did.

Do you understand how much of an achievement this novel is? Tape recorders, VHS tapes, legal transcripts, long drives across American interstates for interviews, pay-phone interviews, magazine articles: it all comes together with terse, poetic turns of phrases and chapter ends. As far as the written word as technology, this is state-of-the-art technology. The novel that IS 20th Century America. Hi-tech, maybe even postmodern (who cares). Po-Mo or Plain Old Mo, worry not: there's none of that MFA 2k10 twitter novel, visit-from-the-goon-squad bullshit. The medium is not the message here in Gary Land. It's about people, even when they are not around anymore. This is a book about what it means to love, be loved, suffer, die and clean up the mess. It's fucking perfect, people.

So what's this story about?

“This book does its best to be a factual account of the activities of Gary Gilmore and the men and women associated with him in the period from April 9, 1976, when he was released from the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, until his execution a little more than nine months later in Utah State Prison.” (The Executioners Song “An Afterword” 1087)

What is this story REALLY about? A condemned killer scribbling Shelley and erotic letters to his love; the loneliest, most beautiful young mother in Utah; a Hollywood carrion bird; jailbirds, drunks, Mormons, salt-of-the-earthers, widows, a schizophrenic rape survivor; journalists, playmates-of-the-years, the ever-decent Mikal Gilmore - younger brother, the avuncular giant with a heart of gold.

The Anti-Josef K: a man rightfully condemned trying to face his judgement with God, if only the waffling bureaucracy would allow it. Lawyers, judges, clerks and activists pulling all-nighters and swilling vending machine coffee all to serve the noble machinery of justice. Commuted executions, a minute behind schedule.

Nihilism, the death of the American frontier, moral decency, desperate drunken infernal everlasting love. Ghosts.

A trailer park and a dying woman, eyeing the ghost of her son in the eyes of the headlights.

All of this happened.

PS.....

This might be the best novel written about television. Gary and Nicole's tiny life of driving, flirting fucking and stargazing in Orem, UT gets transmitted into a clichéd, white-trash, bonnie-n-clyde circus. Gary and Nicole are beamed into the dens of American families all over the states. Parents tell their that Gilmore is a no-good bum and a psychopath and that Nicole's a poor little whore who got sucked up by a big bad wolf. Some boys cut out Nicole's picture and tape it to their walls, some girls even write Gary letters each to tell him that she's only 13 but she loves him. Gary emaciates and get shot full of holes, Nicole and her apparition reel through a looney bin, but thanks to Geraldo and Co. they become the talk of the Tuesday meatloaf in Culver City. I know not the words to convey a fate that fucking tragic. Neither Dante nor the Devil could cook up a crueler, shallower imitation of immortality.

This thing took me months to read because New Yorkers like me are guerilla readers and you can't lug this tome around. It was an early-morning/late-night armchair companion, which it deserves. Just read this thing, please. It'll terrify you, make you cry, make you laugh, make you almost glad to live in such violent, alienating times in such a violent, alienating place.

Look here you sonofabitch, Gary Gilmore just wants to live with his Elf Nicole Baker in eternal love or wants to die right NOW.

Peace and Love,
Brendan Kiernan

This was a comprehensive account of the events that transpired around the execution of murderer Gary Gilmore. The incident made national headlines at that time as Gilmore chose not to appeal and desired the sentence to be carried out. There were intense legal battles on both fronts. On one side, there were those who attempted to stay the execution due to their opposition to Capital Punishment. On the other side, there were those who believed he had the right to have his execution proceed.

This novel was not only a powerful piece of history in its own right but also held a personal significance for me. I have a cousin, also named Gary, who is serving a life sentence for murder. He was initially sentenced to death, but the verdict was overturned. What really struck me was the description of Gary Gilmore's life and character, and how closely he resembled my cousin. At times, it was nauseating to be reminded and to realize just how manipulative and narcissistic some individuals can be. It is equally sickening to witness how easily some people are influenced and exploited by those like Gary.

"The Executioner's Song" offers a profound exploration into the soul of an individual who clearly lacked any semblance of sympathy, empathy, or the ability to reciprocate emotional needs with his fellow human beings. There are numerous excuses for his behavior, with blame often being placed on the legal system for shaping him into what he became. However, from what I have read, Gary Gilmore was precisely like the Gary I know, and he was not made bad; he was born bad.

"The Executioner's Song" also provides a critical examination of the subject of Capital Punishment. The book presents arguments from both sides. For me, returning to my earlier statement about some people simply being born bad, I am in favor of Capital Punishment. I could elaborate further, but that would be based on my own opinion rather than the novel itself.

This was a substantial book, yet it was thorough and informative. It shares a similar style to Capote's "In Cold Blood".

This is a truly remarkable book. However, it takes on an even greater significance if you happen to be from the area where the story is set. I still have relatives residing in Spanish Fork, Utah, the very place where Nicole and Gary lived. I also have cousins who were, and quite possibly will be again, inmates at the prison in Point of the Mountain, where Gary met his fate in 1978. Even at present, I find myself situated halfway between the true crime locations of the Hi Fi murders in Ogden, Utah (where the co-perpetrator Dale Pierre plays an inadvertent role in EXECUTIONER'S SONG), and the high school in Bountiful, Utah, where Ted Bundy abducted Debby Kent. To this day, kids claim to see a ghostly VW bug in the back parking lot. It's all rather grim. But I mention all this geographical context to emphasize that Mailer gets one thing absolutely spot-on from an insider's perspective, and that is the speech rhythms of Utahns. In part one of this book, titled "WESTERN VOICES," Mailer provides us with a tour of the place and its inhabitants. As I was reading, I couldn't help but feel these waves of nostalgia washing over me, especially when it came to the way people spoke and interacted with one another. It was exactly like my childhood. Mailer's intention was for us to identify with even the most minor of characters, which is why he赋予 them such vividness and awareness, despite their often negligible role in the overall narrative. Since reading is such an intensely personal experience, it only enhanced my enjoyment to envision it all in my mind as the book unfolded. This is my second attempt at this lengthy book, and I can firmly say that it was well worth the effort to finish it.

Holy shit!

I picked this book off the shelf after a trip to SLC. I knew Utah was related, but I had no idea that I would devour 1000 pages so quickly. I truly believe that this should be required reading in the US of A.

As a lover of Vollmann, and being unfamiliar with any of Mailer's novels or longer works, I now compare his non-judgemental style and pathos to that of WTV. However, Mailer writes in a manner that anyone who made it to high school could understand. I don't know. I'm going to be foisting this book on many people in the near future.

I seriously got a near-wrist sprain from power reading while drinking wine and thinking I was immune to pain. Then I alternated with the e-book. It was an intense reading experience that I won't soon forget.

I remember vividly reading Norman Mailer's magnum opus "The Executioner's Song". To my surprise, I wasn't put off by its ridiculously long length, which clocks in at over 1,000 pages.

Perhaps it's because Mailer is an incredibly talented writer, a true master at immersing readers deep into the story. This might very well be the reason he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for this book.

Just like some early classic "true-crime" nonfiction, such as Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" that comes to my mind, "The Executioner's Song" endeavors to answer, in a humane and empathetic manner, the question of man's inhumanity to man.

The book is based on the real-life story of Gary Gilmore, who committed a series of brutal crimes, was arrested, and later executed for his deeds. He never denied his culpability and, in fact, desired to die at the hands of the executioner.

Like much of Mailer's work, there is a perverse love of violence that makes his writing more than a little disturbing. (This aspect is something I have grappled with, as I find his writing to be both beautiful and cruelly brutal.) Nevertheless, this book is about male violence - and a distinctly American violence - that is perhaps Mailer's best attempt at dissecting, analyzing, and understanding it.

The Executioner's Song won a Pulitzer and appears on every true crime "must read" list I have ever seen.

However, for the life of me, I don't understand how or why. I have never slogged so hard through a book, with so little payoff.

It's over-inclusive in the most ridiculous extreme. Do I really need to know when and why and what kind of milk his ex-boss bought one time?

Note, that isn't a facetious example. I truly love detailed true crime, where those details actually help one understand the story and the people involved.

This book, definitively, is not that. It's just an excessive amount of typing. A whopping 1,056 pages of it.

It seems as if the author included every single minute detail, regardless of its relevance or importance.

As a result, the reading experience is more of a chore than a pleasure.

I expected so much more from a book that has received such high accolades.

But unfortunately, it fails to deliver in so many ways.

The CCLaP 100 is an interesting project where I read a hundred so-called literary classics for the first time and then write reports on whether they deserve the label. In this essay, we'll focus on "The Executioner's Song" by Norman Mailer.

This 1980 book is one of the last great works from the "New Journalism" of the countercultural years. It claims to be a "true-life novel" that tells the story of Gary Gilmore, the first person executed in the US after the Supreme Court lifted the death penalty ban. The thousand-page manuscript is divided into two parts: "Western Stories" about Gilmore's life and crimes, and "Eastern Stories" about the trial and the media frenzy surrounding him.

The argument for it being a classic is that it won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize and was a commercial hit. Its fans also say that Mailer was a pioneer of the "New Journalism" movement, which changed the way we think of journalism. However, the argument against it is that the book won the Pulitzer mainly because of Mailer's reputation, and that the "New Journalism" movement is just an excuse for arrogant men to stroke their egos. Critics also say that the book is padded and badly written, and that it only gained notoriety because of its size, the trendy issue it tackled, and Mailer's infamy.
My verdict is that while the book had an impact on journalism, it's not a classic. Mailer was more known for being himself than for his works, and the book is too long and tedious. It's also only subpar in quality, and I think a biography of Mailer would be a better read. So, in conclusion, "The Executioner's Song" is not a classic.

And don't forget that the first 33 essays in this series are now available in book form!

Boy, was this a read! It's right up there with prairyerth on shoe size. I had this feeling that if I didn't finish this extended case history of one man's journey through the court, parole, and prison systems of America, then Mailer was going to punch my ears.

Once Gilmore commits the double deed and ends up in prison, the story stretches a bit thin, much like in "The Onion Field," with court details that start to veer into true crime territory. However, what keeps it interesting from start to finish is the relationship between Gary Gilmore and the quite young Nicole. If I remember correctly, he was fifteen years her senior. Their love is a classic low-rent wild west tale, with the 1970s in Utah as a backdrop. Nicole stays home with the kids (who were not Gilmore's), and Gilmore steals snow skis, gets drunk, and bugs the hell out of an auto dealer for a new truck he'll never be able to afford. Of course, once he gets the truck, he has to find a way to pay for it, and lucky for one typewriter, Mailer gives him the story of a lifetime. It's one classic American tale of the west, lust, jealousy, the death penalty, and of course, Norman Mailer.

I dug up a VHS copy of the film adaptation at Odd Obsession video here in Chicago. It's actually a made-for-TV film starring a young and very ambitiously corny Tommy Lee Jones in the role of Gilmore and an even younger and very foxy Rosanna Arquette in the role of Nicole. I'm a sucker for old made-for-TV films, and this one has all the classic elements: hubris, glimpses of nudity in bedrooms where the moon is blue, quick pan shots of blood after a gunshot, swelling violins, a country western score, an occasional clarinet that caters to the emotions of the stock characters, and the dreaded "to be continued" when the going gets tough. Considering how long the damn book is, the film never felt rushed nor condensed.

Also of interest to those who have read the book is Matthew Barney's Cremaster series (part II, I believe), in which Barney plays Gary Gilmore in a rather chilly gas station scene. I saw a still of this movie hanging at the contemporary art museum the other day, and from Mailer's words to Barney's tribute, Gilmore's journey is a continued reminder of America's fascination with people losing it over love.

Dželatova pesma occupies a tenuous border between the novel and what we call documentary prose. It is perhaps not the most representative example of Mailer's (I really can't bring myself to use "Mejler" until I'm forced to) style. However, it is an interesting and in its own way, a quality book. A thousand and ten pages may seem a bit excessive for the last year in the life of a small-time criminal, but this is actually a very detailed portrayal of two specific segments of American society from the late 1970s. On one hand, we have the lower and working classes and their fringes - people who have at some point fallen out of the social system and are now somehow clinging to it and on its outskirts. On the other hand, there is the machinery that is set in motion when one of those people outside the system disrupts its functioning: first and foremost, the judiciary, and secondly, the media. And Mailer is far more interested in these two groups than in Gary Gilmore and his completely senseless murders. He bases his text on thousands of pages of interviews, news reports, and court documents that he processes and shapes in such a way that gradually, as the novel progresses, the reader sees (not exactly enjoys, but sees) the point of all the verbosity. The voices from Gilmore's environment - members of his family, acquaintances, comrades, court and prison staff, countless lawyers and journalists - gradually merge into a chorus that attempts to provide us with a complete picture of American life at the bottom. Yes, it's incredibly ambitious (that's Mailer) and often much more laborious than one might expect, but it comes across as extremely believable (each voice retains so much individuality that the first few hundred pages seem as if Mailer really didn't try very hard to shape those powerful interviews) and often impressive (but again, these are moments that need to be carefully sifted through). The novel is dominated by two characters: in the first half, it's Nicole Baker, Gilmore's girlfriend (nineteen years old, three marriages, two children, the older one is five, you do the math; a life story correspondingly grim), and in the second, Lawrence Schiller, a professional journalist-photographer. The dominance of their voices quite clearly reflects the two-part structure of the book - before and after the murders - and the effort the author has put in to provide a complete picture of the people he is writing about. It's not that there is much positive to say about Schiller's work, but he tries so hard to be correct and invests so much of himself in what he does - and is capable (or Mailer is capable of making him so) of truly vivid insights into his own personality that... well, nothing, you start to develop human feelings even for him.

It's a good book. A good book of three hundred pages disguised as another seven hundred that you somehow have to get through.

The law, with its inherent randomness both geographically and demographically, has always been a source of great perturbation for me.

Moreover, the confluence of disparate precedents only serves to compound this issue, transforming the courtroom into a veritable "Wheel of Fortune."

Money is amassed by painstakingly layering one brick of precepts upon another. The end result is an exorbitant wall, lacking in doors, shoddily constructed and on the verge of crumbling.

There exists a way out, but it is accessible only to the officers of jurisprudence and their ilk. If one wishes to depart with them, there is a fee to be paid for freedom, yet there is no guarantee.

Yes, Mailer is indeed a remarkable writer, and the story is told with great finesse.

However, there is scant pleasure to be derived from someone else's misfortune, nor do I relish reading about how one individual can dismantle and shatter the lives of countless others. Gary Gilmore, that despicable celebrity, would be a nonentity in today's world, a mere paragraph on page three of a local tabloid.

So, what have we gleaned from his crime and his defense decades later? Does the legal and prison system function effectively? No, but the business thrives, dockets and prisons are overflowing, and it continues to expand unabated.

I still can't believe that he did all that just to talk to Johnny Cash.

It seems almost不可思议. He must have been extremely determined and perhaps even a little bit crazy.

Maybe he was a huge fan of Johnny Cash and this was his once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Or perhaps there was some other deeper reason that we don't know about.

Whatever the case may be, his actions show just how far some people will go for something they truly desire.

It makes me wonder what I would do if I had the chance to talk to someone I idolized.

Would I be as brave and persistent as he was?

Or would I let fear hold me back?

These are questions that I will have to think about.

But one thing is for sure, his story has definitely left an impression on me.