Word: mailer
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Over ten years ago, Kate Millett wrote Sexual Politics, starting a protracted personal debate between Norman Mailer and various feminists, and more importantly, reemphasizing the extremely political nature of fiction...
...Confusing the simply antisocial with the revolutionary, Mailer develops an aesthetic whose chief temperamental characteristic is a malign machismo, still dear to those in the New Left who have fallen under Mailer's spell in adolescence or continue to confuse Che Guevara with the brassy cliche of the Westerns," she wrote. In Mailer's world, "sex is war, war is sexual," and so women are the enemy, to be treated with violence as a solution for male angst...
Somehow I had hoped that the reams of feminist criticism of American literary sexism (see Andrea Dworkin's Woman Hating; see my article on Kerouac in the September 1978 Seventh Sister) would knock writers like Mailer off their pedestals, would make younger writers realize that they could criticize an author's male chauvinism while admiring his use of language. Perhaps this is too much to ask of Harvard, where, as we all know, the pugilist has a private little ring at 21 South Street...
...very simple for young writers to emphasize style in a way that excludes social content. It is very simple for them to copy the slick New York Establishment--Mailer, Updike, Barthelme, Adler, and so on. I am not advocating a reductionist "socialist realism." I am advocating a transcending of solipsistic subjectivity. I am advocating a thoughtful search for a style that will encourage understanding of the political choices that face us daily. So, as a literary critic, I find Attanasio's piece unoriginal, everly self-conscious, slick...
...Smiley's People, De Carre (1 last week) 2. The Devil's Alternative, Forsyth (7) 3. Princess Daisy, Krantz (4) 4. Memories of Another Day, Robbins (2) 5. Jailbird, Vonnegut (3) 6. Triple, Follett (5) 7. The Executioner's Song, Mailer (6) 8. The Establishment, Fast (9) 9. The Last Enchantment, Stewart (10) 10. Portraits, Freeman