Norman Mailer (1923–2007)

"I went to Palm Springs, and I didn't much care for it." You could, I guess, say that that's "The Deer Park" in a nutshell, but there's more to this book than mere moral censoriousness or lurid exposé. I haven't read much Mailer -- this is just the second book by him that I've ever read -- but the writing here is fantastic: crisp, forceful, masculine, and flowing. Reading it's like watching a really good pianist going after something stern and atonal with marvelously controlled intensity. show more Mailer's basic tool here is satire, and some film fans will, I suppose, have some fun trying to match the book's characters to their real-life analogues. Beyond that, though, I liked "The Deer Park" because there's so much about people that Mailer seems to get right in it: it offers an exquisitely informed description of the egoism of actors, the self-defeating egotism of many who who try to create art, perhaps most frighteningly, the weird mix of sentimentality and greed that motivates so many of the truly powerful. There's also pimp, self-made philosopher, and dead-eyed madnman Marion Faye, a portrait of a thoroughly destructive personality that's enormously chilling and, in its way, far ahead of its time. There is a lot of sex, indulgence, and general moral decay here: the novel's air of plush, seedy degeneracy is one of its attractions. You can see why a publisher of that time might have rejected it as obscene. But much of sexual content manages to be both bracingly frank enormously arousing, and I tend to think that writing about sex without seeming prurient or too self-serious is harder than it sounds. But the book is also an invigorating mix of literary and the unabashedly pulpy, beating writers like James Elroy and Robert Stone to this combination by at least twenty years. There's a recurrent religious analogy here that I think Mailer might take too far, and it is, I think, the only moment in which the book slips a little. Also, I found that the book, for all the scandal it contains, perhaps a bit too long and a bit too slowly paced, though that may simply be a reflection of its louche desert setting. I don't think that "The Deer Park" is one of Mailer's better-regarded books, but perhaps it's due for a revival. Few pieces of real-deal literature I've ever read sizzle so tantalizingly while going so deep. show less

Very good book. Much like what I've heard about Mailer, it's bold, arrogant bordering on hubris, but unlike many authors who talked big yet created works that left me feeling oddly unfulfilled and even a bit cheated, this book by Mailer (his last before his death) left me very much in his grasp as reader to writer.

His word choice is superb, his dialogue at times outlandish and hilarious, descriptions are telling and, like the dialogue, can be perversely funny. Adolph Hitler and his origins show more (including family and formative years) are made both ridiculously sad and at times nearly pitiable. And the narrator (his true nature is revealed fairly early on but I won't spoil it here) is equally interesting to read.

The book does lag a bit, which is surprising given the actual quickness of the narrative (especially with the long and detail orientated descriptions of Hitler's father Alois' post retirement bee keeping profession) and I would have loved to see Mailer tackle Hitler in adulthood and rise and eventual fall as the Fuhrer as the narrator seems to hint in the books closing (no historical fiction style alterations here).

But all in all it's a great read. Again, much like from what I've heard about Mailer it's a brilliant mess. show less

This is the book that Hemingway should have written about bullfighting. An absolutely wonderful read that is enhanced by the enigmatic Ubuntu philosophy that animates it. In this work we watch Mailer work out his own attitudes and prejudices as he falls down the rabbit hole of the black art of boxing. As readers we too become infected with Conrad’s amour de l’afrique... what a great love letter to Africa this book is.

"Confidence on both sides makes for war." (pg. 194)

The 1974 'Rumble in the Jungle' boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman is so iconic and rightly famous – as both cultural spectacle and an example of sporting skill – that it becomes hard, as a reviewer of Mailer's The Fight, to determine how much of one's enjoyment comes from the book itself and how much from the event it recreates.

It must be said that Mailer makes the reviewer's task much easier by laying his own style on show more pretty thick. It certainly helps differentiate the writer's performance from those of the two fighters. Originally a two-part piece of narrative journalism, the author indulges in a fair amount of waffle and cod philosophising. I've never really been keen on reading Mailer, whose overblown machismo and performatively tough prose style appear to be a legitimate imitation of what naysayers wrongly impugn of Ernest Hemingway's writing, and in The Fight Mailer seems to wilt under the comparison. Hemingway wrote well about boxing, of course, and even better about Africa, and Mailer's frequent references to 'Papa' and to bullfighting only remind us how much better it would be if the real master writer had lived to watch Ali vs Foreman in deepest Africa.

Mailer writes the fight itself very well; in these chapters he provides a masterclass in sportswriting. But the vast majority of the book is concerned with the build-up to the fight; Mailer builds the tension well enough, but his attempts to get into the two different personalities of Ali and Foreman skew towards baseless mythologising. The Fight is a much better read when Mailer delivers hints of the humanity hidden under the armour of the great fighting personalities: Foreman's monomania and silence, for example, or the slight whispers of doubt when Ali sees just how much punishment Foreman can put into a heavy bag in training.

Moments where Mailer reaches some stark insight into the forces underpinning the fight are to be cherished, for they provide glimpses of how astute this author can be when he rouses himself from the waffle. At its best, The Fight conveys the specialness of this particular match-up: the undefeated powerhouse Foreman versus the messianic artistry of Ali, a man who had been stripped of the championship title Foreman now held because of his opposition to being drafted for Vietnam. Mailer calls this inability to contest the removal "a frustration for a fighter doubtless equal in impact to writing A Farewell to Arms and then not being able to publish it" (pg. 175). Such legitimate writing flourishes are rare in the book (though it must be said they do become more frequent the closer we get to the fight itself), and they are often specks of gold in a sometimes swampy morass of waffle and mud. 'New Journalism', a movement Mailer was considered a part of, seems in retrospect to be an excuse to go on a bender rather than commit to a disciplined re-editing session. Again, those Hemingway references do no favours to Mailer; even in now-out-of-print pieces like The Dangerous Summer (about two matadors competing against one another over the course of a bullfighting season), Hemingway could write with greater clinical ferocity than his imitator.

It's a shame that Mailer can provide some good writing moments without harnessing such punching power into a consistent fight strategy. One such flourish occurs when Mailer speculates on why Mobutu, the African dictator hosting the Rumble in the Jungle, didn't appear in the stadium despite the self-evident PR benefits. Mailer suggests that it wouldn't do for the self-image of the 'great chief' to be recognised as physically inferior stood next to Ali and Foreman: "God does not stand next to his sons when they are taller" (pg. 109). As much as I enjoyed The Fight, I also wish Mailer had taken his own advice, and not made such a vain effort to stand next to the taller Hemingway.

A strange mix of verbose waffle and taut, hard-hitting observation, The Fight does justice to the boxing match it chronicles while also diminishing itself. Mailer cannot take his own advice, not only in the 'God standing next to his sons' line, but in the principles of fighting. Mailer, it seems, sees writing as pugilism, yet writes that boxers and champions are liars. They have to be, because "once you knew what they thought, you could hit them" (pg. 43). In his machismo and his desire to surpass Hemingway, Mailer showed his opening, and because of his bluster and waffle you don't mind hitting him there and telling him he's not God after all. The Fight is a good book, but it could have been a great one. Mailer built Ali vs Foreman up into the mythology he wanted it to be; it's a good mythology, but it leaves the reader feeling as though there's something remaining, something that a less self-indulgent writer might have had the wherewithal to claim.

If you want the full story, the great story of Ali vs Foreman, I can't really recommend Mailer's book. It is only a supplement, a sideshow to the real 'gen', as Hemingway would have put it. To get the real story, I suggest instead watching the excellent documentary film When We Were Kings (in which Mailer participates, but is not allowed to dominate). In the documentary, we can focus on two legitimate greats of the sport as they go at each other – a determination for the best to prove themselves against the best that seems to have fled from the sport nowadays (at time of writing, it seems unlikely we will ever see Fury vs Joshua with all the title belts on the line). Choose the documentary, then – for in the book, I began to grow weary of being distracted from the two great fighters by the sight of Mailer shadowboxing with himself. show less