In case you missed it, Norman Mailer is dead. Along with writing a bunch of books you never read but feel like you probably should, apparently he was kind of a jerk.
Except for USA Today, the news source for optimists, most papers don’t hold back on who Norman Mailer was when he was alive. (Or if they are holding back, he must have been a real creep.) A round up of meanie comments after the jump.
It is important to acknowledge, though, that he was a singularly bad performer. He entertained and he instructed, but he also irritated, alienated, baffled, and appalled. He told dirty jokes that were not funny, and he tried on outfits and accents that were preposterous???a Jewish boy from Brooklyn, he sometimes dressed like a sea captain and affected a Texas drawl???and he had a few moments, deservedly notorious, of disastrous misjudgment.
He was a major talent who could not keep himself from reminding you that he was a major talent, an astute observer of his moment, who tended to operate as if that moment were entirely his ??? It’s been said that no other major American author wrote so many bad books.
No great writer???and he was, at his best, as great as he said he was???ever wrote quite as much crap.
Many of his books, quickly written for money or attention or both, do not stand out at all. Or they do so for the wrong reasons. His 1983 novel, “Ancient Evenings,” remains one of the great debacles in 20th-century literature.
New York Post tribute by Gay Talese:
He was a man who never said no. He never said no to anything. I saw him quoted in some hardcore porno magazine 20 years ago and I thought, ‘God, there’s nobody he won’t talk to’ – there’s Norman Mailer in Hustler magazine, Penthouse magazine, as well as the Paris Review.
[ed: What was Gay Talese doing reading Hustler?]
Oh relax. It’s not like it was Kanye West’s mom who died or anything.
No. 1
Elle says:
I would have called Mailer a latent homosexual based on his fascination with buggery but that would be to slander homosexuals who are not sexually stuck in adolescence. In spite of his own belief that his every utterance was golden, he was a purile hack who enjoyed the lionization of other middle aged narcissists and college kids (who at least come by their narcissism honestly as an ordinary phase of maturation).
RIP Mailer. You should have stuck with engineering. Perhaps you could have expressed your “rebellion” by building falling bridges. Then people would have recognized your fakery and you would have died a penniless drunk, a fitting end.
Posted: Nov 12, 2007 at 5:06 pm
No. 2
hms says:
Hmmm. Wonder why all these weathered New Yorkers are moving to Cape Cod and the Islands? Because there they are treated with respect, dignity and privacy. They are treated like ordinary human beings. Norman had a wonderful relationship with his fellow townsfolk and they are surely going to miss him. Goodbye, Norm.
Posted: Nov 13, 2007 at 1:23 pm