The Executioner's Song is a departure from Norman Mailer's usual style, offering a spare and quiet retelling of a double murderer's life. The book's flat, declarative sentences and lack of grandiloquence make it a refreshing and riveting read, despite Mailer's own dismissal of it as merely an exercise in craft.
The Executioner's Song stands out as a unique work in Norman Mailer's oeuvre. Unlike his previous works, which were known for their attention-grabbing antics and complex prose, this book offers a stark and quiet narrative. The simple, declarative sentences and the absence of Mailer's typical stylistic excesses make it a refreshing change. The story of Gary Gilmore, a double murderer, is told with a sense of calm and detachment, which is both disarming and riveting. Despite Mailer's own devaluation of the work, considering it merely an exercise in craft, the book's flatness and tight-lipped quietude are what make it so compelling. It's a departure from his usual maximalist style and offers a poignant look into the lives affected by Gilmore's actions.
Quick quotes
The flatness and tight-lipped quiet of The Executioner's Song after several decades of Mailer's attention-grabbing real-life excursions is what made it so disarming, then very quickly riveting.
The simple declarative sentence, hosed clean of beardy metaphors, adverbial and adjectival excess, of discursive detail and baroque, often bonkers, "existential" riffing, is something that Mailer had always seemed congenitally incapable of writing.
The flat, blank voices of the American Midwest, the voices of the people who were related to Gary Gilmore, or whose lives were otherwise rent by being dragged into Gilmore's orbit, seem to assume an added poignancy or sense of desolation by being transcribed by a writer for whom their very flatness and blankness represents a kind of dusty-throated deprivation.