DID YOU KNOW? The Mailer book that received the best reviews was not his best-selling 1948 war novel, The Naked and the Dead, but a nonfiction book which was not a best seller, The Armies of the Night, his account of the October 1967 anti-war March on the Pentagon. Winner of a Pulitzer and the National Book Award, Armies barely edged out Naked, 4.100 to 4.031. These numbers were arrived at by rating the reviews his books received in 25 major publications (New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Time, Newsweek, New York Review of Books, National Review, Esquire, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Commonweal, New Yorker, etc.) on a five-point, low- to-high scale, 1.0 for a dreadful pan, and 5.0 for an enthusiastic review with few caveats. Coming in third was Mailer’s 1972 collection, Existential Errands (3.777), and fourth, The Executioner’s Song (3.74). The book with the worst reviews was Mailer’s second book, Barbary Shore, a novel set in Brooklyn, which racked up a score of 1.944 (reviewers disliked the debates about politics and economics which take up half the novel). In next-to-last place is Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, which totaled out at 2.000 (it was reviewed in large part by art critics and scholars, who felt Mailer was poaching on their turf). The publication that gave the most positive reviews to his work was The Village Voice, which he co-founded (3.929 average); the most negative reviews came from the liberal, anti-communist bi-weekly, The New Leader (2.167). Two others of note: The New York Times Book Review (3.111) ; and The New Yorker (2.846). A total of 417 reviews were rated for this study, which was published in the bibliography Lennon and his wife Donna Pedro assembled, Norman Mailer: Works and Days (Sligo Press, 2000).
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Barbara’s Picks, Oct. 2013, Pt. 4: Helen Fielding Returns, Franklin and Fennelly Team Up, and Lennon Offers a Norman Mailer Biography.
Emeritus Vice President for Academic Affairs and Emeritus Professor of English at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania, Lennon knew Norman Mailer and chairs the editorial board of the Mailer Review. So he is nicely primed to write this authorized biography, which draws on numerous interviews and unpublished letters. Given the richness of Mailer’s life as author and activist, public intellectual and philanderer, who consciously worked to shape his own identity, it’s hardly surprising that this work is nearly 1,000 pages long.
Provincetown is the most interesting and beautiful summer resort town on the East Coast. It has Bar Harbor’s salt breezes, old inns and chowder houses, but not its manicured stuffiness; its dunes are superior to those on the Jersey Shore (where Norman Mailer lived as a boy); and its trinket shops are preferable to Atlantic City’s tawdry casinos.
Like Fire Island, P-Town has a summer crowd of artists, collegians, gays and assorted eccentrics putt-putting around on mopeds, but it also has some real history. If it lacks Newport’s robber barons, its colonial roots are more impeccable, since the Pilgrims shivered for three weeks on the dunes near Race Point before moving on to Plymouth. It also has a venerable community of Portuguese fishermen, Yankee houses with widows’ walks, and the tallest structure along the 100-mile peninsular arm running to Boston, a 252-foot stone monument to the founding Pilgrims.
But six weeks after Labor Day, the town turns from circus to seaweed. All that remains are the Portuguese, a few Yankees and a clutch of burned-out cases. One of them is Timothy Madden, a bartender and erstwhile writer and the hero of Norman Mailer’s latest novel, a thriller set in the near-empty bars, cottages and dunes of the town at the edge of America.
Ghosts rattle and gibber through the story, which takes place during a few days in drizzly November. Some of the ghosts are old (Pilgrims, Indians, fishermen and whores), but two others are the recent dead—two blonde women who have been decapitated. Both had been involved with Madden—in fact, he is pickling himself in bourbon to ease the pain brought on by the desertion of one of them: Patty Lareine, his wife. Between times he remembers with fear and trembling his failed attempt to scale the Pilgrim Monument.
The second blonde, Laurel Oakwode, he meets in a bar and loses track of after a night of drink, sex, suicide and murder. Within 50 pages, Madden has awakened with a thundering hangover, found a bucket of blood spilled on the passenger seat of his car, and discovered a blonde head buried in his marijuana cache in the dunes of nearby Truro (I won’t reveal whose head), and the name “Laurel” tattooed on his arm. Discovering who killed whom and why is, of course the raison d’etre of the story, a literal tangle of baling wire, anchor chain and blonde hair.
[box type=”note”]Excerpted from a review of Tough Guys Don’t Dance, first appeared in the State Journal-Register (Springfield, IL), August 24, 1984.[/box]
Elizabeth Mailer, Donna Lennon, and Mike.
DID YOU KNOW? Mailer wrote the screenplay and directed the film version of Tough Guys Don’t Dance in 1987, starring Isabella Rossellini and Ryan O’Neal. The film was nominated for worst film of the year (Golden Raspberry Awards), and best film of the year (Independent Spirit Awards). It was filmed in Provincetown over a 60-day period in the fall of 1986, and has become a cult classic. Filmmaker Donn Pennebaker called the film “Tarantino before it time.”
Just a reminder that May 1, 2013 is the deadline to apply for our summer fellowship and workshop program in Brooklyn Heights.
Mike discusses “The Presidential Papers” in this clip from Norman Mailer: The American.