The Executioner's Song (1979)

I'm sure this masterpiece will stay with me for a very long time. It's the only work that I know of that can seriously challenge In Cold Blood for the claim of greatest true crime literature of all time.

The attention to detail and the portrayal of a time and place is magnificent. Some reviewers may have been frustrated by the level of description, but I think that was largely the work's point. The fine and banal detail of a scene like a person's last night alive points out the absurdity of capital punishment and maybe also more generally all life.

I would classify this one as an absolute must-read in American Literature. ( )

exhaustive ( )

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. ( )