Word: mailer
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...HARVARD last spring, Mailer said that the book was the hardest he had written. He was confronted with "the spookiest adventure in history, a landing on the moon," and the event had nothing more to show for itself than machines and technicians whose personalities were wedded to the "absolute computer of the corporation." Faced with such a banality of facts and resolved to restore "magic psyche and the spirits of the underworld" to the venture, Mailer, calling himself Aquarius and summoning the aeronautical engineering of his undergraduate days, takes recourse to his senses to give us a dazzling report...
...century Romantics revolutionized the European imagination in their times. The movement may already be underway; the gradual debunking of modernism, the guerrilla television movement, and the mellowing of rock all point to a return to direct response, to the senses and the magic of psyche. And there is Norman Mailer. By setting out to rescue events from their dim, receding world and revivifying them in a present tense of action and contemplation, Mailer is perhaps the only writer today who makes a difference to the American experience...
Despite all his talents, each of Mailer's new journalistic endeavors inspires a touch of cynicism, for his style often works like an elastic bag into which he can pour anything from political conventions to traffic congestion and come up with instant apocalyptic meditations. His early essays in the middle fifties were pure mental bombast; the weight of reflection far exceeded the weight of its object so that it hardly mattered what he was talking about. Starting with the '64 Republican Convention and culminating with Armies of the Night. he had found the kind of material to which his species...
Previously, one feels, "corporation land" existed merely as a nasty abstraction for Mailer; now he is bearing witness to its most impressive achievement and is forced to alter his understanding of America. He feels a large contempt for the counterculture, "an army of outrageously spoiled children who cooked with piss and vomit while the Wasps were quietly moving from command of the world to command of the moon." He is not sure whether the astronauts are the "last of the old or the first of the new men," but he is certain that the American spirit is moving into...
...While Mailer is not one to repeat himself. there is much here that we have seen before. There are the ritual reports on his bowels, liver, and marriages; his preoccupation with the small town mind; the constant dualities of vision: the stylistic brilliance, the quick substitutions of abstract for concrete; the sweeping flights, within single phrases, from the commonplace to the sublime (Hemingway's brains are "scattered now in every atmosphere"); metaphors that reach out and grasp every aspect of common experience; and the quick observations that outgun entire works of lesser writers (as when Frank McGee is described...