Mitchiko Kakutani | Nov 10

NYT - 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. more at link

_{1."George Washington did not cross the Delaware for Capitalism," -Shmuley Boteach.
2.The Dems haven't punished the GOP enough, so you're going to reward the Republicans?}

I have read a great deal of Mailer's work, and to me he is beyond question America's Most Exasperating Writer. He has been brilliant; he has also phoned it on more than one occasion. MHO.

However - I think the reason I mourn his passing is that he has been so inextricably linked to the Events of my (baby boom) generation as a commentator. He's been the (sometimes drunken) correspondent from the front, having writing fiction and non-fiction and essays and reviews that fumble for the pulse of U.S. 'culture'. Not a giant, perhaps, but a part of the background and foreground noise that I became accustomed to decades ago.

I suppose the Great American Novel hasn't been written yet, or if it has, it wasn't written by Mr. Mailer; it wasn't because of a lack of talent, more a lack of focus or a lack of desire.

I regret you won't being writing any longer, sir. Godspeed.

I take it for granted that there's a side of me that loves public action, and there's another side of me that really wants to be alone and work and write. And I've learned to alternate the two as matters develop."
- Norman Mailer

_{Turn back to the Constitution - and READ it.}