The Executioner's Song (1979)

What a reading event. Massive, and fast-moving. It consumed my time during this grey mid-winter. Dave Egger's forward (which I encourage you to read afterwards) captures the breadth and Mailer's work better than I ever could. I'm not sure I've ever read a journalistic "event" before this that rode the midline so well and so consistently, offering an observation or emotion one moment and then counterbalancing it - withdrawing it, the next. I guess, in that way, a metaphor for the American human condition. A balance of astronauts and mass-murderers, as Eggers suggests. During the middle part of the book I was trying to adhere to my new approach of being a tougher Goodreads "grader," assuming this would come in at 4 stars, but once done I really had to think about what kind(s) of works can surpass an effort like this, and so, ended up giving it 5. That may change....need to let this sit for a bit. ( )

I have heard it said that Norman Mailer is inconsistent within novels, whereas ordinary writers are inconsistent novel to novel. I have always found this true when reading his books. He was a prolific all-American novelist, who repeatedly tried to write The Great American novel, and experimented with form and content. His first so-called great work was The Naked and the Dead, still infamous, which I found by turns inspired and unconscionable. Good luck trying to fix Mailer's moral standpoint in either of these novels. Like that first 700-pager, The Executioner's Song is even more ambitious but recounts the vicissitudes of Gary Gilmore, of all people.

I'll be honest. I thought this was one of the greatest books I'd ever read for around 250 pages. Over time I awoke to the realization that it was a flawed masterpiece, and finally, after hundreds of pages more, I lost nearly all my enthusiasm for it, not to mention that the word 'masterpiece' had begun to feel like a wildly inappropriate appellation. The length is exhaustive, and the details verge on minutiae. You might rate him five stars simply for how much research and legwork he did. But you should still take the book with a grain of salt, since it is technically fiction. By labeling it so, Mailer could have taken any number of liberties with the facts. He was famous for erecting these Mount Rushmore-like tomes out of endlessly compiled research. Must have been a real treat for him recreating Truman Capote's method - see In Cold Blood.

There are moving moments, but on the whole it is spread too thin to be moving. It has brilliant moments, but they are sprinkled throughout mundanity and wacko segments of unexplainably detailed sex and heavy-handed commentary.

Gary Gilmore, as expected, is a difficult fellow to sympathize with by the end, though you might have admired him for gumption and charisma, until you really get to know him. Mailer writes about him as he would a close friend, but Mailer's own lack of squeamishness really turns me off. The same thing happened when I read Ancient Evenings, which might be my favorite novel of his so far, where you can tell after a while he is padding the narrative with the kinds of scenes he really likes to write. Read enough of it, and you get an icky feeling in the pit of your stomach. You picked the book up for the sake of intellectual investigation, for history, but the history is not the focus of half of the writing.

Executioner's Song, on the other hand, is a brilliant character study in its own right, even if the focus and writing is uneven. Are some people incurable? Is America's justice system moral? What justifications can be given for the 'insanity defense?' These are just some of the questions posited by the book's subtext. Regardless of its mind-numbing length and pompous pretenses, it is an important testament by an overblown, but talented American writer. ( )

Tooo long. The flat writing style and infinite detail of these dreary Utah Mormons' and non-Mormons' lives is kinda more-ish, it is just waaaay too long. And there is, really, nothing exciting in it.

I am only marking this as "read" because at page 694 that's a book and I'm done. (I have a separate shelf for 'read-abandoned'

I do not recommend reading this book: it's very average, and you could have read two books in the time it takes to polish off this one. AND, after 400-500 pages, it switches to details of the film that was made, which is just boring.

That's it: boring. ( )

It's undeniable that this tome is a very well-researched account of the life and death of Gary Gilmore, and anyone interested in learning about such an event could probably find no more valuable volume. However, my complaints with this book were based in its lack of proper editing and delivery. I expected this to be a true crime novel in the sense that it was delivered like a novel, just about real life events. That was not necessarily the case. The book goes into painstaking detail about things that are wholly unnecessary and irrelevant to the central takeaway of the story. The first half tells the veritable life stories of everyone involved in Gary's time out of prison, and even of everyone Gary's girlfriend had ever had sex with. Because of this and the fact that Gary is portrayed at this point in his life as a fairly unpleasant and frustrating person, I barely got through the first 200 or so pages, considering quitting multiple times before finally reaching the murders and feeling my interest start to pique. It's safe to say that if you take this long to catch a reader's interest, something is wrong.

The second half of the book is also overly detailed. It discusses all the major players in Gilmore's lawsuit as well as in the attaining of movie and book rights for his life story. Not always the most emotional or fascinating of material. It also contains copious excerpts from Gary's letters to his girlfriend as well as transcripts of interviews and other notable events. The takeaway here is that this book was a 1000-page treatise on the Gilmore case when it could have just as easily become a 500-page zinger of a novel.

Despite this criticism and the knowledge that most people I know wouldn't have had the patience I did to get through this book and experience the good parts, it did have them. The end of the book, in particular, which covered Gary's final night and execution, did leave me emotionally impacted. It was possibly the deepest consideration I've ever given the death penalty and what it would be like to face death like that.

I will not tell you to avoid this book, but definitely be aware of what you're getting yourself into ahead of time. Also, be warned that the book contains gratuitous sexual content and a rather detailed and disturbing take on suicide (namely, Gary trying to convince his girlfriend to kill herself when he died so that she would never sleep with anyone else) ( )

3.5

Engaging but overdrawn. ( )