Word: mailer
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FICTION: Endless Love, Scott Spencer Passion Play, Jerzy Kosinski Shikasta, Doris Lessing The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth The Green Ripper, John D. MacDonald Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner, edited by Joseph Blotner
...Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer...
...difficult to tell entirely whether Mailer or various tape recorders are to be congratulated for The Executioner's Song. Mailer seems to have undertaken the project mostly for money. He never met Gilmore but acquired an immense pile of tapes from a hustler named Larry Schiller, the entrepreneur who had earlier promoted deals involving Jack Ruby, Marilyn Monroe and Susan Atkins of the Manson gang. Mailer spent additional weeks interviewing Gilmore's family, his girlfriend Nicole Barrett, and surrounding bit players...
...skeptic who contemplates Mailer's labors in orchestrating all these interviews is tempted to think that he deserves the Nobel Prize for Typing. But Mailer does not work stupidly; the flat, banal voices mustered here soon become haunting. The book is like an immense issue of the National Enquirer being endlessly explicated until it is forced to yield some truth. Gilmore's story is a sort of immense white-trash saga; he accomplishes his victory even in death by calling down all kinds of electronic gods to attend: photographers, wire services, television networks, and at last even...
...certain that any of the mysteries Mailer touches upon are worth this huge effort. Still, his mastery of detail is superb. The story has its startling, bizarre touches: Gilmore's father, it seems, was the illegitimate son of Houdini. Gilmore himself remains a punk, though a moderately interesting one. He spent more than half of his life in jail, and, like other intelligent prisoners, had a routine. He could con intellectuals and other innocents on the outside who tend to be fascinated by violent criminals-literate ones-in the same way that Gladstone was fascinated by prostitutes. Gilmore used...