|
|
Attack of the
intergalactic ego By William McKeen, Ph.D. © Copyright 1999 William McKeen |
|
||
What a
relief. Just when you were worried that we'd limp to the end of the 20th
Century without Norman Mailer's definitive word on what-it-all-means, he
has deigned to share his wisdom with us. Look for the workers comp claims to
rise when Barnes & Noble employees complain of hernias after toting
this thing around. The Time of Our Time is an
embarrassingly large book, a work of intergalactic ego, a doorstop the
size of two Bibles and a Weight Watchers cookbook combined (but not nearly
as valuable as those mouth-watering yet non-fattening recipes in the
latter).But Mailer seems to think that for us mouth-breathing proles His Word is necessary for the continuation of life on the planet. Fact: Mailer has written some wonderful books. Another fact: He's also produced much self-obsessed drivel. Like all talented writers, Mailer needs an editor. Instead, he has used a shovel. He follows this premise: The 20th Century as portrayed in his work, both nonfiction and fiction. Not a bad idea, but he doesn't stick to it. Near the end, as we race through the 1990s, he suddenly decides to take the time machine back to the Egypt of the Pharoahs, so that he could excerpt his novel Ancient Evenings and perhaps boost paperback sales.  The idea of the anthology isn't bad. But Mailer can't be objective enough about his work to recognize that a few telling pieces might do the work of the kitchen-sink approach. Imagine this concept in the hands of say, John Updike. Now that would be an interesting social history of the United States. The unbelievably prolific Updike could assemble a cogent and illuminating collection of his fiction and essays in half the space. But Updike has always had too much respect for his readers than to blunderbuss his way through an anthology like that. Not so with Norman. The book was published on the 50th anniversary of the appearance of Mailer's Second World War novel The Naked and the Dead. That classic war book set Mailer up in American letters as a junior-varsity Hemingway. He followed with a decade-plus drift through unremarkable fiction and occasional pontifications until 1968, when he wrote The Armies of the Night, a great non-fiction novel about America during the Vietnam War years. The book's central character was Norman Mailer and the author wrote about himself in the third-person and with the sort of insight you might expect from a skilled novelist. That book won the Pulitzer Prize and re-established Mailer. Yet it also very nearly ruined him. For the next decade, he assumed he was still an interesting character that readers cared about. He played a significant part in the anti-war demonstration described in Armies of the Night. He did not, however, go to the moon. Yet he made himself a major character in Of a Fire on the Moon, about the 1969 lunar landing. (Geez ... must've been crowded in that module with Armstong, Aldrin and Collins, Norman.) He did not climb into the ring with Ali in Zaire, yet he was the major character in The Fight. His ruminations about the sexual revolution were sidetracked by his manifesto in his role as the supreme allied commander in the battle of the sexes in The Prisoner of Sex. He did a lot of for-contract pontification for big-picture books on Marilyn Monroe and graffiti art and seemed to have turned into nothing but a blowhard-for-hire by the end of the 1970s. Then he redeemed himself again with The Executioner's Song, his gigantic nonfiction novel about killer Gary Gilmore and his request to be put to death. Mailer played a role in the real-life story, yet it an uncharacteristic exercise in restraint, he stayed out of the book. Pulitzer time again. Since then, Mailer has been his old sporadic self, with occasional sheer brilliance such as Harlot's Ghost. But The Time of Our Time is an obscene self-indulgence. Read the original books and pass up this orgy of self-congratulation. Ego Boy probably just published the book to remind us that it was Norman Mailer's century and we just lived in it.
|
The Time of Our Time
Hunter S. Thompson
Dr. William McKeen is journalism department chairman at the University
of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications. McKeen writes
frequently for The Orlando Sentinel book page and has authored several
books, including: