« LANNAN COMES TO SOCAL | Main | Reflections on Leonard Michaels »

November 10, 2007

NORMAN MAILER DIES

Mailer

It's a terrible cliché to say an era has ended but, truly, it has.

Mr. Mailer belonged to the old literary school that regarded novel writing as a heroic enterprise undertaken by heroic characters with egos to match. He was the most transparently ambitious writer of his era, seeing himself in competition not just with his contemporaries but with the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

Kakutani offers an appraisal:

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.

The deserved tributes are sure to pour in over the days and weeks ahead but for now, you can check out:

* His Books and Writers page.
* PBS's American Masters.
* An extended edition of one of his last interviews with EW.
* Mailer's IMDB Page.  (We remember, we confess, nearly walking out of Tough Guys Don't Dance.)
* John Freeman remembers Mailer at Critical Mass.
* An analysis of  his 1957 essay "The White Negro."
* "Driving Mr. Mailer"
* Mailer's 1964 Paris Review interview.
* The archive of Mailer's many contributions to the New York Review of Books.
* Excerpts from The Spooky Art, Why Are We at War? and The Castle in the Forest.
* The Mailer Society's The Mailer Review.
* Remembrances from David Ulin and the superb Louis Menand.

There are a lot of young overeducated upstarts and pretenders these days who fancy themselves entitled to be latter-day Mailers.  They haven't an ounce of the real thing.  He will not be so readily replaced,

Posted at 09:51 AM in Obit |

| | Pin It! | |

Comments

John

End of an era. A crazy, energetic, buffoonish, brilliant, silly, colourful twister of sentences.

Posted by: John | November 10, 2007 at 06:25 PM

Steven Augustine

If only Kakutani's appraisal weren't so rife with stock, fill-in-the-phrase making ...and so strangely off. If Norman Mailer didn't heed the "siren call" of fame, who did?

Anyway: NKM was The Greatest Novelist, in my opinion (though he never got around to writing The Greatest Book). If only he'd written Herzog, Sabbath, and Underworld, everything would now make sense...! The universe is a tad colder with his lights off. I am suitably spooked.

Posted by: Steven Augustine | November 11, 2007 at 06:50 AM

Andie

A poignant bit of synchronicity - On the day he died the episode of The Gilmore Girls in which he appeared was screened on South African television. A couple of funny little scenes where he is thrown out of the local inn because he's just sitting there drinking ice-tea all day, and scaring away the lunch customers. So he moves to the diner where the owner has no clue who he is.

RIP

Posted by: Andie | November 11, 2007 at 03:20 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

Categories

Subscribe to this blog's feed