A Reading Now Report

Only about a tenth of the way through The Executioner's Song. Mailer's narrative restraint is notable here; the opening pages are spare and elementary sounding, unlike, for example, the opening pages of An American Dream or Armies of the Night. At first one thinks he has opted for a minimalist reportorial prose style diametrically different from his own and wonders at the badness of a decision not to vary the sentencing or indicate hierarchies of thought with the occasional subordinate clause. Then one hits the first chapter centered on the ditzy Nicole, when the prose shifts ever so slightly into an airy, still unsubordinated, brainlessness that aptly captures the low-Q victim-narcissist that she is. But it's not her speaking--that is the chapter is not narrated by her--it's simply Mailer's omniscient narrator with a contact high. It reminds the Reader that even in Mailer's other books when his prose seems most out of control, the excesses are in fact utterly under his discipline. And makes the Reader wonder: is Mailer suggesting the inability to subordinate or coordinate is a symptom or cause of Gilmore's pathology? Or of the vast edge-dwelling economically and ethically limited milieu from which such a pathology occasionally springs?

I am no authority on Mailer, having read only a handful of his books. He is rather too demanding, and his long books too time-consuming to read very often. But Executioner's Song had been on my list for a long while, and this June I've been in a Mailer frame of mind. My edition, released last year by Grand Central Publishing and available in electronic format which alleviates the physical toll that hefting a Mailer novel exerts, has an introduction by Dave Eggars who, I am pleased to see, mentions the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, which he won in 2010 for Zeitoun and at which, returning in 2011 to bestow that year's award for nonfiction, he met "real-life murderer" Wilbert Rideau, author of  In the Place of Justice. No authority at all, just an admirer of bits and pieces, like, particularly, the closing pages of Armies, the essay on Marilyn. But I think I may come to agree with Eggars that this, Executioner's Song, is his best.