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God, the Devil, and the Agency
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20169 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1992 |
2,497 Words |
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Bruce Allen
Bruce Allen is a contributing editor to Kirkus Reviews and a
freelance reviewer for the Boston Globe, Sewanee Review, and
several other publications.
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HARLOT'S GHOST
Norman Mailer
New York: Random House, 1991
1,310 pp., $30.00
THE LIVES OF NOMAN MAILER
Carl Rollyson
New York; Paragon House, 1991
414 pp., $26.95
No contemporary writer is more acutely sensitive to the discordant reality of contemporary American life than Norman Mailer, our indefatigably visible literary celebrity and aging provocateur. Whether exploring the psychic reverberations of an antiwar protest march on the Pentagon (The Armies of the Night, 1968) or the impact on our collective fantasy life of America's consensus sex goddess (Marilyn, 1975); whether tracking the unconventional (indeed, criminal) paths to manhood trod by those aspiring to high levels of power and influence (An American Dream, 1964) or by those struggling in the choppy mainstream inhabited by America's underclass (The Executioner's Song, 1979) Mailer has boldly moved forth--as a participatory journalist and renegade novelist--looking for new territories to comprehend and conquer.
He is a breast-beater and risk-taker; implacably engage and belligerently hell-bent on more experience, more knowledge. There's something of Dreiser and Jack London in Mailer's hunger for literary prowess--just as we see Hemingway reborn in his frequently confessed compulsion to surpass his writer gods and receive recognition as "the best."
It's tempting to say that Emerson and Melville might have applauded Mailer's vaulting ambition and brute self-confidence (though I'm sure he'd have appalled Henry James). Nevertheless, one understands the very ambiguous standing presently accorded a writer who routinely boasts of the great multivolume novels he intends to compose, and furthermore displays a "penchant for presenting himself in public as a goof."
The quoted words are those of biographer Carl Rollyson, whose Lives of Norman Mailer capably recounts the facts of a live lived at dizzyingly high speeds and grown increasingly controversial since the extraordinary success of Mailer's accomplished first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), was followed by the cryptic near-failures that immediately succeeded it (Barbary Shore, 1951; The Deer Park, 1955) and by Mailer's truculent comparisons
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