Customer Reviews

Mailer: A Biography

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Norman Mailer is the Ultimate Bad Boy. Jay McInerny and Bret Easton Ellis are nothing compared to Norman. He paved the way and it's really interesting to read about the life of someone who has made it as a bad boy. The women who fall for him, the publishers who pay him mountains of money... he is a talented writer, but it leads the reader to the question about how much we all overcompensate artist celebrities. I saw the pictures of the beautiful women and read the descriptions of their magnetic personalities and I couldn't imagine why they chose to overlook his enormous ego. But I shouldn't sound superior. I read the whole book in a weekend.

Ms. Dearborn's book, though a good read, seems to be mostly an update of the previous biographies of Mailer. It's not clear what else she brought to the subject. Her views of Mailer's books are fairly representative of conventional wisdom (she liked "Armies of the Night", didn't like "Of a Fire on the Moon") and her efforts to chronicle his personal foibles are fairly predictable. I admit my bias as an unabashed Mailer fan, and perhaps that led me to expect more discussion of the literary aspects of Mailer's life, since the personal matters had already been examined extensively by Hillary Mills and others. Still, I enjoyed the book.

Mailer stands as one of the most biographied of living important writers, and you wonder why Dearborn bothered with this project at all. I would guess it was precisely because there is so much already extant material, primary and secondary, that she thought the material would fall together in a sing song formula, a recital of grimmly familiar facts. Such seems the case. The "unprecedented" access she has to you materials in regards to Mailer's work and life is a reedy claim, a dead blade of grass the wind blows away, and the author's absolute inability to bring any insight, interpretation or analysis to Mailer's work is infuriating. Now , one may presume, Mailer's career is at a point when the longer view of a 51 years of writing is most what this work demands, and Dearborn gives us summer re-runs. This book is like reading old gossip magazines. One mourns the trees sacrificed to print this screed.