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Norman Mailer: An Appraisal

This morning brings the news of Norman Mailer's death at the age of 86. Certainly lionised as one of America's best writers, his death probably marks the passing of his generation of authors.

The NY Times has an appraisal of the man and his writing:

"Norman Mailer was nothing if not ambitious. He once declared he wanted to write “a novel which Dostoyevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read.” He wanted to “alter the nerves and marrow” of the nation with his work, to “change the consciousness” of his times. He wanted to write the Big Book, the Great American Novel. He wanted to hit the longest long ball of them all.

Though his first book, “The Naked and the Dead,” was an estimable war novel that won him enormous celebrity at the age of 25, and he would go on to write many more novels over the decades, it was nonfiction, not fiction, that would prove his most lasting contribution. “The Armies of the Night,” his noisy, self-dramatizing account of his own experiences in the 1967 antiwar march on the Pentagon, became a founding document of what Tom Wolfe would call “the new journalism”: nonfiction that possessed all the ardor, attitude and body language of a novel but remained grounded in old-fashioned legwork and observation.

It was a genre particularly suited to covering the tumult and cacophonous change abroad in the 60s, a decade so surreal, so stupefying, so confounding, in the view of some, that it surpassed anything a novelist might plausibly imagine. And Mr. Mailer used his copious talents — a quick, skewering eye; a gift for the cameo portrait; bat-quality radar for atmosphere and mood; and blustering, bellicose prose — to capture the American spirit as the country lurched from the civil rights and antiwar demonstrations of the 60s into the Watergate era of the 70s.

In his best work Mr. Mailer made America his subject, and in tackling everything from politics to boxing to Hollywood, from astronauts to actresses to art, he depicted — or tried to depict — the country’s contradictions: its moralistic prudery and grasping fascination with celebrity and sex and power; the outsize, outlaw past of its frontier and its current descent into “corporation land,” filled with cheap, consumer blandishments and the siren call of fame."

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