mallorys_camera | Norman Mailer, Dead at 84 (Reply)

Norman Mailer dead at 84…

A great favorite of my mother's. Mailer was a Brooklyn boy who made good, hamishe.

Advertisements For Myself was one of the books my mother hid behind the other books on her shelf, along with Ulysses, Lolita and an expurgated version of Lady Chatterly's Lover. I'd found and devoured them all by the time I was 11. I remember being particularly put off by the essay in which Mailer buttfucks a sarcastic young Jewish woman – I think he actually uses the word "Jewess" which I hadn't seen between hard covers since I finished Ivanhoe in the fourth grade. What was that all about? I didn't get the "white Negro" stuff at all.

I'm trying to remember whether I've ever read a single novel by him – yes. Yes, I did: The Deer Park. I was drawn by the Versailles symbolism of the title. Read it in my early twenties but even then at the height of my infatuation with style over story, found it overwritten. I longed to stalk Mailer with a bullhorn: "Subject, verb, object! Subject, verb, object!"

I did like The Executioner's Song very much, but of course, not as much as I liked In Cold Blood. As much as Mailer despised and belittled Capote, Capote was the greater writer and I'm sure they're all having a merry laugh over that in the afterlife equivalent of Elaine's.

I loathed The Armies of the Night. An incredibly dishonest and self-serving book, I thought – of course, by then I knew a leettle bit about that subject matter...

So after I read Mailer was dead, I tried to remember how he became irrelevant. Didn't it seem as though one moment he was an Important Literary Figure and the next, he was a buffoon? A characature of a macho wannabe?

"Two words," said Ben. "Jack Abbott."

Ah, of course! The macho writer got played like some sort of sob sister languishing on the other side of the bars for her conjugal visit. A literary reputation is never going to recover from that.

I suppose Gore Vidal will be the Reaper's next victim. Now that will make me sad. I adore Gore Vidal.

And I wonder whether any of the American writers writing in the last half of the 20th century will be remembered?