Given the literary pretensions I once harbored, I suppose I should say something about Norman Mailer's passing.
(Crickets chirping, lonely wind howling, tumbleweeds blowing across the floor.)
Okay, here's my thought about Mailer: Eh.
To be honest, I never understood the man's reputation. All right, the only books of his I actually finished were An American Dream (again: eh)and The Executioner's Song (pretty damn good, but unimaginable without the template of In Cold Blood), but from my samplings of his other work, I found...nothing, really.
Armies Of The Night is forever credited as one of the most influential works of New Journalism, but compared to the contemporaneous work of Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson, it just doesn't hold up. Wolfe's prose may have been self-consciously flashy, but it was born of a genuine attempt to convey an experience. Thompson tended to write about himself as much as his ostensible subject matter, but that's okay, since he was a truly fascinating individual. Also, both of these guys could really write, whereas Mailer just cranked out words.
Oh, Lordy, did he crank out words. Every few years, he'd knock out yet another 500-page doorstop, making the inevitable claim that this one was really, no shit, really, the greatest thing he'd ever written; upon its release, the world would shrug and he'd go back to feuding with Gore Vidal. Tellingly, his squabbles with other authors seem to get more notice in his obits than anything he wrote. After all, how can you make a case for greatness from the guy who wrote Ancient Evenings, or that godawful Marilyn Monroe bio, or that pathetic thing about Jesus? Outside of the rarefied New York literary world, Mailer never really had much of a reputation because he simply wasn't that good.
