Word: mailer
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...PRESIDENTIAL PAPERS by Norman Mailer. 310 pages. Putnam...
...important to give the reader a sense of how this once-talented, once-creative writer's abominable prose drugs its hairy snowman feet across column after column of type. Follow his traces hoping to find something, but always at the end you find nothing there. Mailer concludes, as far as I can tell, that Mary finked the job because "nice girls live on the thin juiceless crust of the horror beneath, the screaming incest, the buried diabolisms.... Yet Mary is too weak to push through the crust and so cannot achieve a view of the world which has root...
...point to be made is not that Mailer's image is a direct steal from Robert Louis Stevenson, who said it much better. The point to be made is that with this the editors of The New York Review of books have chosen to introduce their fourth issue. Inside the same issue is the exquisite Genet review by Lionel Abel which exemplifies everything that the Review can do. One is not convinced that the editors have learned to distinguish between them...
Abel brings in sexual detail when it is necessary, amusing, or relevant in discussing Genet. It often, but the sensation one has even during the most graphic descriptions of homosexuality is that Abel is involved in clean, thoughtful, important discussion. Mailer's subject (despite one very graphic seduction in Miss McCarthy's book) is intrinsically far less sexual than Abel's study of Genet. Mailer manages somehow to be at once less interesting and dirtier...
...suggesting that the future of The New York Review balances on a choice between these two critics. There will no doubt be reviews more able than Abel's and others even worse than Mailer's. The question is whether the Review can develop a nucleus of writers such as Abel, more concerned with their subject than with themselves...