I have not read Norman Mailer in a good 25 years; nor does anyone I know read him. When he is reviewed these days it is invariably by men who write with respectful love of the way he made them feel when they were young in the late '50s and early '60s, and those electric sentences of his first hit the air, galvanizing a famously silent generation into remembering that it is necessary to stay alive inside one's own skin. It was the force and rhythm of the sentence structure; like poetry, it seemed neither description nor analysis but the thing itself. Really, Mailer's writing was an astonishing prod in the age of the gray flannel suit. That is, for the men it was a prod. For intelligent women of the '50s (the Doris Lessings among us), I think it must have been another matter. I don't really know what Mailer meant to them; I don't think they themselves knew. But in the '70s, women in their 20s and 30s knew what he meant, at whose permanent expense "feeling alive" was to be had. And when we said so, out loud and in print, Mailer turned vicious. The antifeminism was pathological, a thing we turned away from in fear as well as rage.

Now, all these years later, I pick up this dictionary-sized retrospective of his work like an archaeological artifact, blow off the dust of my old, long-dead angers and sit down to hear the sound of Mailer's voice once more, to see if I cannot listen (beyond the words that once filled my head with blood) for the value of what is actually being said by an influential writer who, for so long, was emblematic of a world that said to women like me, "Over my dead body."

James Baldwin once wrote about having first met Mailer in Paris when both writers were in their early 30s. He remembered with affection "the way Norman argued. He argued like a young man, he argued to win; and while I found him charming he may have found me exasperating, for I kept moving back before that short, prodding forefinger." When they met again a few years later, at a party in New York, something "seemed different about him, it was the belligerence of his stance, and the really rather pontifical tone of his voice ... [He] was smiling and having a ball. And yet -- he was leaning against the refrigerator, rather as though he had his back to the wall, ready to take on all comers." And again, there was that "thrusting forefinger." Clearly, the pose had hardened.

This was the early '60s. What Baldwin couldn't know at the time (nor Mailer, either, for that matter), was that the belligerence would never dissolve out -- never change shape, color or texture -- not once in the 40 years that lay ahead. It couldn't because, as it turned out, Mailer was never to know himself any better than he did at that moment. For the rest of his life he would be standing with his back to the refrigerator taking on all comers.

To read this book through from beginning to end is to be made sharply aware of how compelled Norman Mailer has been by an aggression that speaks directly to the feeling of having been left out, dismissed and discounted: a condition common to many writers who successfully turn early grievance to writerly effect, and a thing Mailer himself did brilliantly and repeatedly in his prime. He became his own metaphor. His grievance was the grievance of the country. To talk about himself -- what it felt like to be thwarted, stifled, taken down, prevented from living openly, and with intensity -- was to talk, in the '50s and '60s, about the inner death of middle-class America.

From "Boxing with Hemingway" (the first piece in the book) on, Mailer's nonfiction is remarkable for the use to which he openly -- years before the confessionalism of popular culture had taken hold -- puts this habit of exposing himself in all his weakness and all his anxiety. Having adopted the distancing device of speaking of himself in the third person (a trick seen at the time of writing as a piece of shameless egoism), he freely, happily, repeatedly confessed to envy, greed, insecurity, raging competitiveness. What is curious is how little affect his confessionalism achieves. "Himself" is nothing he confesses to. Himself is the driving quality of the prose. It's the rhetoric that is the compulsive confessor, the finger pointer come alive in the jabbing, prodding, taunting feel -- not the substance, the feel -- of the sentences. The way those sentences are accumulating, that is Mailer's self on the page, and the aggression in them never lets up. It contains all his intelligence, all his bravado, all his shrewdness and insight. Literally: contains it. It -- the aggression -- is never changed by the subject, never influenced, never deflected. It does the changing.

This glittering, pugnacious insistence through a rhetoric that knows no bounds, being written in a period of restraint and repressiveness, about the need to live openly, and with intensity -- this was all put in place in 1959 when Mailer wrote "The White Negro," his now-famous manifesto of the existential heroism of orgasmic black violence. It is an astonishing piece, marked as it is by the clotted sentences, the headlong drive, the sheer inability to stop. Mailer is so in love here with the need to "arrive" that he goes on arriving until he exhausts both himself and the reader. Repeatedly, the power of his own insight is swamped by his own overkill. Nothing he ever wrote after "The White Negro" went any further or deeper, or took us to a different place, or failed to exhaust us. But some strange and wonderful things came out of this driving hunger of his:

There is the piece on the Democratic convention of 1960. Everyone went into that convention convinced that Kennedy would be given the nomination -- and indeed he was. Yet the hall erupted in the most amazing wave of welcome when Adlai Stevenson mounted the podium. The clapping went on and on, threatening never to stop. Mailer makes the moment thrilling. He describes it with an eloquence that comes directly out of his poetic intelligence. He understands the longing behind the applause.

Then there is the speech at Berkeley on Vietnam Day: "One must speak of alienation, that intellectual category which would take you through many a turn of the mind in its attempt to explain the particular corrosive sensations many of us feel in the chest and the gut so much of the time, that sense of the body growing empty within, of the psyche pierced by a wound whose dimensions keep opening, that unendurable conviction that one is hollow, displaced, without a single identity at one's center." That is his remarkable opening sentence. What follows is a strong, moving presentation of America in mid-Vietnam war ("The country is in disease ...").

And, of course, there is the problematic but ultimately magnificent "Armies of the Night": pathologic and this time transcendent. Here, in this famous account of the 1967 Pentagon march, we see clearly that the professional self-exposure that came to characterize all his nonfiction is Mailer replacing the corporate redneck voice of his fiction with "himself" -- and here the replacement does mount up into something extraordinary, as so often it does not. Yet, throughout the piece, we also see clearly the continual rise and fall of his self-command as a man, and as a writer.

The night before the march there's a party and an indoor rally at the Ambassador Theater in Washington. At the party Mailer consumes a huge amount of alcohol, and then before he's to go onstage he has to urinate. By now, he's drunk, can't find the light switch in the bathroom and misses the bowl. He describes this hilariously, observing that in the morning the theater owners will blame the piss on the floor on the communists. Once onstage -- now really drunk -- he begins to bomb and starts to tell the story about missing the bowl, going on and on until people start yelling at him from the audience. This drives him to further excess. He begins to curse (as no other speaker has), and is bewildered when the audience roars its displeasure. Puzzled, he tells the reader that he loved talking obscenely: "It gave a heartiness like the blood of beef tea to his associations. There was no villainy in obscenity for him, just -- paradoxically, characteristically -- his love for America. He had first come to love America when he served in the U.S. Army, not the America of course of the flag, the patriotic unendurable fix of the television programs, and the newspapers, no ... he had come to love what editorial writers were fond of calling the democratic principle, with its faith in the common man. He found that principle and that man in the Army, but what none of the editorial writers ever mentioned was that the noble common man was as obscene as an old goat, and his obscenity was what saved him ... The sanity ... was in his humor; his humor was in his obscenity."

True, but as the years went on, the obscenity in Mailer's writing became an unbroken rush of language that grew increasingly more vicious, and when it did it lost its American-ness, as well as its humor. This was the poison of a writer growing old with his private grievance intact, projecting it onto the idiom of his time and place and calling it cultural identity. That same poison is there in the work of writers like V.S. Naipaul and Martin Amis and Gore Vidal -- and in them, too, it fails. The "idiom" is neither English nor Anglo-Indian nor upper-class American; it is simply that of an anger, there from the cradle, that precedes culture and almost always sense of things well into middle age. It wasn't life he was at war with; it was writing; it was himself. And this made the reader his antagonist. "He did not have a notion of what he would say next," he tells us somewhere in "Armies of the Night," "but it never occurred to him that something would not come. His impatience, his sorrow, his jealousy were gone, he just wanted to live on the edge of that rhetorical sword he would soon try to run through the heart of the audience."

In 1971 Mailer faced Gore Vidal on television in a now famous session of "The Dick Cavett Show." He had already written his antifeminist tract "Prisoner of Sex" and Vidal, in his own nasty way, had taken him down in the pages of the New York Review of Books. So before he ever walked onto the set Mailer was feeling humiliated. In the waiting room backstage he decides how he will handle his bad feeling: "Mailer -- like that general he could never become -- was contemplating the military chances for entering an ambush of such delicacy connected to such strength. The only answer was attack. Shatter all prepared positions. Go out, he said to himself, and smash that fucking tea house." And he did. He came out battling, made a shambles of the program, and along with it the most monumental and horrifying fool of himself. He was nearly 50 years old, and he'd been doing this for more than 20 years: still standing with his back to the refrigerator, taking on all comers.

Two other writers working around the same time as Mailer also developed voices that originated in murderous truth speaking -- George Orwell and James Baldwin. Each of them labored long and hard to make anger serve thought. Orwell did it most successfully, and we remember almost everything he said. Baldwin produced a powerful rhetoric that also served, and we will respond to much of his writing as long as American literature lasts. To be now in the presence of Mailer's voice speaking throughout 1200 pages of writing that span 50 years, is to be overwhelmingly aware not only of its unchanged sound, but that one hardly remembers anything it actually says, only that it is determined to drive its rhetoric into our hearts. This is a startling conclusion. Startling and depressing.