Word: mailer
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...moment is quintessential Mailer, combining swagger, a touch of menace, self-mockery and high good humor. Such charm in close quarters could overwhelm a roomful of enemies. How could anyone not wish this impish iconoclast happiness, prosperity, long life, enough success to make him happy and enough failure to keep him on his toes? But mellowness? Hold that for a while, spare him and the rest of the world such tedious peace. Says Mailer: "I've never been impressed by mellowing. Usually the people who have mellowed always have just a touch of sadness, because maybe they shouldn...
Throughout his intense immersion in the time of his times, Norman Mailer has repeated his conviction that making history is preferable to reading it. In his influential essay "The White Negro" (1957), Mailer turned the emerging social type known as the hipster into a daring pioneer adrift in "the perpetual climax of the present," freed of all moral guides and codes of conduct except the thrumming of his own nervous system. The author specifically disavowed any precedents for this existential frame of mind: "If the ethic reduces to Know Thyself and Be Thyself, what makes it radically different from Socratic...
...Mailer not only defined this consciousness but became its chief public spokesman and exemplar. His career evolved as a series of highly visible acts, literary and personal, performed according to what he took to be the imperatives of the moment: write a book, direct a film, run for office, put up your dukes. History, Mailer said in 1980, "is not history, but a series of immensely sober novels written by men who often don't have large literary talents, and have less to say about the real world than novelists...
Given his antipathy toward the outdated, Ancient Evenings (Little, Brown; 709 pages; $19.95) is hands down the most surprising work Mailer has ever offered. It really is set entirely in an alien long ago, just as the author had been promising during the decade he took to write it. Yet no amount of advance speculation proves adequate to the thing itself: an artifact of evident craftsmanship and utterly invisible significance...
...book is already some 230 pages old when Menenhetet I eases into this narration, and none of the characters seems in any hurry to pick up the pace. Worse, Mailer shuns the devices that can make long pieces of fiction irresistible. Suspense is banished: everything has already happened in Ancient Evenings, not only historically, but also in the lives of its people. Nothing is surprising, except perhaps how polymorphously perverse and consistently swinish the ancients were, according to their newest historian...