The Time of Our Time
The Armies of the Night
The Prisoner of Sex

A L S O +T O D A Y

The Overspent American
Reviewed by
Dante Ramos
A Harvard economist blames technology and advertising for a "new consumerism" that's plunging many Americans into debt

T A B L E+T A L K

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P__U__N__C__H._drunk_____
An old enemy looks over Norman Mailer's collected essays and finds, to her startled sorrow, a man who couldn't stop fighting.

BY VIVIAN GORNICK | 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."

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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.

N E X T+P A G E+| A confessional anger that reveals nothing

ILLUSTRATION BY ALAN DINGMAN