Word: lelchuk
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AMERICAN MISCHIEF by ALAN LELCHUK 501 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
...those who missed the pre-publication publicity, Alan Lelchuk's American Mischief is the novel in which Norman Mailer is shot to death by a young radical intellectual who obviously read An American Dream but forgot to close the cover before striking...
...character bearing his name, rank and serial number was shot by a punk recruit. Furthermore, the bullet was fired into the very end of his digestive tract from a range that politely can only be called pointblank. At a meeting of lawyers and publishers, Mailer offered to reduce Lelchuk to "a hank of hair and some fillings." That literary phrase turned out to be a pretty good description of the novel itself...
Despite selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club and advance compliments from Lelchuk's friend Philip Roth, American Mischief is not much more than another exploitive, topical novel. Lelchuk romps through the confusions and contradictions of today's beleaguered values-marriage, democracy, individualism-like a gratuitous looter in a cultural disaster area...
Norman Mailer shot dead? Through the rear end? With his pants down? It's all just a bit of fiction, said Alan Lelchuk, author of a soon-to-be-published novel in which one character bears that name and suffers that fate. Libel, retorted the real Norman Mailer in a confrontation. "I wouldn't die with my pants down," said he. "You're the father of us all," Lelchuk protested. "You taught us to go as far as you can with literature." As the meeting progressed, there was "shouting and screaming and yelling," according to one participant...