Norman Mailer, Norman Mailer. I firmly believe that I should take a cue from Mr. Christopher Hitchens. Hitchens had no qualms about blasting Jerry Falwell on national television while the latter's corpse was still warm (http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/05...). Now, I am going to make some honest yet unflattering remarks about Mailer. His Goodreads update feed currently shows him reading The Handbook for the Recently Deceased.

This book is truly a 'literary' atrocity. It embodies everything one would expect from an overinflated, super-famous ego. It is the polar opposite of what one would anticipate should win the damned National Book Award AND the Pulitzer!!

The book consists of two hundred and fifty pages of Mailer on Mailer. In it, Mailer discusses himself in the third person (\\"and then Mailer had his 15th drink...\\"). He also writes about his wives, his favoritism for his sons over his daughters, makes a few flippant remarks about Vietnam, provides a brief and annotated lattice-like history of the civil rights movement and key players, and engages in much self-congratulatory aggrandizement about the cool NY literary parties that he believed his attendance at was (at least in his eyes) all but mandatory.

WTF!

Fearing that this book wasn't a fair portrayal of the man/myth, I am now reading The Executioner's Song. I was dreading it, as 1050 pages of Mailer on Mailer seemed like too much for me to endure. However, it has been great so far. It is clearly Mailer's 'fuck you' to Capote's In Cold Blood. It is 1050 pages compared to Capote's 250, and follows a similar journalistic arc - the everyman American psychokiller, his arrest, trial, and death. I'm only 200 pages in, but I do bet Capote felt a bit upstaged. And, 200 pages in, I've not even encountered a back-handed reference to Mailer!

What a truly strange and eclectic book this is. It constantly bounces between different moods and styles, making it feel far from cohesive or having a clear purpose in its erratic shifts.

The opening has a hint of amusement in Mailer's pseudo-paranoid grievances against everyone, but mostly it just presents an irritating picture of a rather unpleasant character. Once he participates in the march, with the help of anecdotes about the various sideshows along the route and at the Pentagon, he tones it down a bit. After he's arrested and jailed, it takes the opportunity for some interesting yet brief character portraits and adopts a more pensive tone. In the final section, Mailer steps back and shows how the march was developed and engineered, as well as the larger course of events during those days, which is great and would have been much more valuable and interesting earlier in the book.

It's extremely difficult for me to separate my judgment of the book from that of Mailer himself, and I'm not even sure if such a separation is advisable. Mailer seems to be trapped in a cycle where he pours a lot of himself into his books, comes across as personally unpleasant, gets bad reviews which he takes personally because he's so present in them, and then uses that as fuel to become even more unpleasant. His politics are a complete mess. I'm rather astonished he didn't turn to the right like some other sixties intellectuals as the decades passed. It seems he wants to be a prudish conservative but is held back by an anti-authoritarian streak, an admission of Marx's logic, and a desire to not be excluded from the liberal social scene. He really seems like a bit of a mess to me.

Overall, I'm quite astonished that this book won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. I suspect that both committees were more charmed by the novelty of the style. After all, it was just a year or two after "In Cold Blood" started the "non-fiction novel" trend. I might still read "Miami and the Siege of Chicago" eventually, but for now, I've had my fill of Mailer for a long while.

An early example of the "New Journalism" that Norman Mailer played a role in pioneering, this work is not an outstanding one.

The majority of the book details the March on the Pentagon in October 1967. Mailer presents it vividly with sharp prose and lively, colorful descriptions. We see the beatniks and Yippies attempting to levitate the Pentagon, the eccentric activists decked out in a wide array of historical costumes, and the contrast between the boisterous crowd and the disciplined MPs and soldiers who held them in check.

Nevertheless, the book is handicapped by Mailer's excessive narcissism. He reflects on his authorial reputation in the third person, touts his antiwar credentials, and compares his astute viewpoint with the often inaccurate accounts of newspapers and the Mainstream Media.

Perhaps it is worth reading for the vivid imagery that Mailer creates, but it is also rife with the author's most irksome shortcomings.

This is a book that delves into the March on the Pentagon, a significant mass protest against the Vietnam War that occurred on 21 October 1967.

Up until that time, it was one of the largest (perhaps even the largest) domestic protests against the War in the US. In hindsight, it is regarded as a crucial historical moment.

It was when the sentiments for and against the War started to solidify, and the body politic began to fracture and polarize. The following year witnessed far more violent protests, but perhaps the roots were planted during this March.

Norman Mailer was present at the March and provided this remarkable account.

The first part, 'History as Novel', details his personal experience of the March. It includes the lead-up events in Washington DC and his arrest during the advance on the Pentagon building, followed by the custodial and legal processes.

Much of this part focuses on what is happening in Mailer's own mind, reflecting on why he is there in the first place. There is a fair amount of dry humor in how he portrays himself in the third person as a character named "Mailer".

While against the War, "Mailer" also seems driven by an egotistical desire to be in the spotlight, competitively positioning himself beside other notables like his friend, the poet Robert Lowell. "Mailer" also contemplates the motives of the soldiers who lined up to defend the Pentagon and the various Left factions involved.

The second part, 'Novel as History', is ostensibly a more objective account of the events, drawn from a wide range of media and inside sources.

The structure of the book works well. Mailer's relatively early arrest means he missed the main protest action, but there is a suspenseful courtroom showdown with a judge who wants to make an example of him.

Then the second half includes an account of what he missed. The brutal treatment of protesters by US soldiers and MPs becomes a gripping climax.

The structure also makes the point that subjective experience can be factually valuable in such a situation, while supposedly "objective" reportage can be rife with bias and interpretation.

Throughout the book, Mailer explores how the March enacted a complex web of macro-conflicts in the US, related to class, race, gender, generational divides, urban vs. rural, liberal vs. conservative, and tradition vs. counterculture.

His background gives him a good understanding of this terrain, having been a soldier in WWII and a radical social critic post-War, as well as a self-professed "Left conservative".

Here is a passage that really stuck with me:

A generation of American young had come along different from five previous generations of the middle class. The new generation believed in technology more than any before it, but the generation also believed in LSD, in witches, in tribal knowledge, in orgy, and revolution. It had no respect whatsoever for the unassailable logic of the next step: belief was reserved for the revelatory mystery of the happening where you did not know what was going to happen next; that was what was good about it. Their radicalism was in their hate for the authority - the authority was the manifest of evil to this generation. It was the the authority who had covered the land with those suburbs where they stifled as children while watching the adventures of the West in the movies, while looking at the guardians of dull genial celebrity on television; they had had their minds jabbed and poked and twitched and probed and finally galvanised into surrealistic modes of response by commercials cutting into dramatic narratives, and parents flipping from network to network - they were forced willy-nilly to build their own idea of the space-time continuum (and therefore their nervous systems) on the jumps and cracks and leaps and breaks which every phenomenon from the media seemed to contain within it.