Chris Roberts is a prolific troll on Amazon, having written 276 negative (mostly one-star) reviews, since late 2010, including one for A Double Life.
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Lover, fighter, saint and sinner – a fascinating biography skilfully traces the contradictions that defined Norman Mailer.
The subtitle “A Double Life” serves as Lennon’s governing premise for exploring how Mailer’s personal life mattered to his writing life and vice versa, but he does far more than merely affirm this abundantly obvious, abundantly volatile relationship. He makes strong cases throughout the biography for the inherent strengths of Mailer’s writing, particularly his achievements in reconceptualising the possibilities of journalism.
Photo by Stephen Borkowski.
The extent to which Mailer’s oeuvre will resonate with a new audience may depend on whether a line can be drawn between his dual role as renowned writer and notorious public persona. The division between the two is often undetectable. At times, this is by Mailer’s design, and at times it’s due to his volatile presence at the forefront of the American cultural revolution.
J. Michael Lennon talks with The Cycle hosts about how Norman Mailer changed American literature.
[Mike apologizes for saying that Mailer was an only child. What he meant was that Mailer was the only male child.]
J. Michael Lennon . . . challenges Mailer obsessives to wade through 960 pages of “Norman Mailer: A Double Life,” as if it were not enough to have finished all 1,136 pages of “The Executioner’s Song,” Mailer’s Manhattan-phone-book-size Pulitzer winner, from 1979.
Heroically brave and mad, prodigious in his industry and appetites, Norman Mailer was an altogether excessive figure. Since his death in 2007 there have been several biographies, but this is the big one — big enough to accommodate a triple or quadruple life, let alone a double. It is also the official one, written at Mailer’s request by J. Michael Lennon, his friend, collaborator and literary executor, who is respectful and affectionate but not hagiographic.
The book is fascinating throughout. All readers will benefit from Lennon’s treatment of Mailer’s writing process, his compulsive philandering, his often crass self-promotion, his unexpected discipline, his capacity for violence, his attraction to and sympathy for criminals, his relationships with his many children and his peers, and his risk-taking in all areas of life and art.
Charles Webster Hawthorne built the barn in 1907 atop a sandy bluff in Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod. He opened it as an art school. . . . In time, however, the school closed. And as the decades passed, the barn became less an incubator of art than an object of art itself. Dozens of prominent artists and writers studied or otherwise spent time in the barn. The list includes Norman Rockwell and Jackson Pollock, Tennessee Williams and Norman Mailer. Little surprise then that in 1979, the barn joined the National Register of Historical Places.