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Was he sparing his family—or himself? He was always mining his experience for his books, and always seeking more. He called experience “the church of one’s acquired knowledge.” For him, the best experiences were unforeseen, experiences that hit you like a brick tossed over a fence.

Richard Brody is fascinated by Mailer’s early life and wonders why the writer never channeled it into his work:

The grandson of a rabbi who struggled in business, the son of a picaresque bookkeeper and an adoring mother, he was a brilliant student and precocious writer.

(His father, a compulsive gambler, was often in debt, on the edge of legal trouble, and frequently unemployed.) Did he not want to write about his days of sheltered timidity? Or did he simply look at his background and find it wanting?

Paul J. Gallagher’s take on the above documentary:

It contains what was good and bad about Mailer—an overweening need to push his ordinary ideas (today’s word Norman is “totalitarianism”), with those occasional sparks of brilliance.

Random, $40 (640p) ISBN 978-0-81299-347-9

The 50 essays collected in this retrospective volume span 64 years and show Mailer (1923–2007) at his brawny, pugnacious, and egotistical best. As Mailer once wrote about himself: “To be the center of any situation was, he sometimes thought, the real marrow of his bone—better to expire as a devil in the fire than an angel in the wings.”

Norman Kingsley Mailer, the author of more than 40 books, encompassing fiction, journalism, poetry, essays, and interview collections, was a prolific and brilliant writer, but he is nearly as well known for his charisma and instigative prodding, his mayoral candidacy and threatened presidential run, his love of boxing, his insatiable promiscuity, and his penchant for settling scores with a firm head-butt.

His books include the novels The Naked and the Dead, The Deer Park, Why Are We in Vietnam?, The Executioner's Song and Harlot's Ghost and the non-fiction works The Armies of the Night, A Fire on the Moon (published in the USA as Of a Fire on the Moon) and The Fight. He is famous for stabbing his second wife, Adele Morales; addressing the feminists in his audience at the University of California, Berkeley, as “obedient little bitches” before going on to suggest that “a little bit of rape is good for a man’s soul”; and assaulting Gore Vidal at a party.

He was one of the most astute cultural commentators of the postwar era, a swashbuckling intellectual provocateur who never pulled a punch and was rarely anything less than interesting. Most of these were from his childhood and adolescence. His curiosity was huge. Was there some other aspect of his early years that he found unspeakable? Although early selections seem dated—among them, “The Homosexual Villain,” his confession of his ignorance of, and hence past uneasiness with, homosexuality—he hits his stride with the 1957 classic “The White Negro,” which equates the mindset of white hipster rebels with the sensibility of American blacks, who have “been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries.” Here, Mailer also draws parallels between outlaw minds and criminal psychopaths, a thread that winds through several essays, notably “Until Dead,” prompted by the execution of Gary Gilmore (subject of Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Executioner’s Song), and “Discovering Jack H.

Abbott,” which launched his campaign to get convicted murderer Abbott released from prison. (Oct.)

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Reviewed on: 09/02/2013

Genre: Nonfiction

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