The Executioner's Song is one of Norman Mailer's best works, praised for its spare and quiet retelling of a double murderer's life. The book's simple, declarative style is a departure from Mailer's usual attention-grabbing and chaotic writing, making it disarming and riveting. The reviewer appreciates the book's focus on human agency and the stark, unadorned prose.
The Executioner's Song stands out as one of Norman Mailer's most compelling works, marked by its stark and quiet narrative. Unlike his earlier, more chaotic and attention-grabbing writing, this book presents a simple, declarative style that is both refreshing and engaging. The story of Gary Gilmore, a double murderer, is told with a focus on human agency and the potential for redemption, making it a powerful and thought-provoking read. The reviewer notes that Mailer's ability to capture the flat, blank voices of the American Midwest adds a sense of desolation and poignancy to the narrative. The book's success lies in its ability to make familiar material feel new and its commitment to common language, which is a departure from Mailer's usual grandiose style.
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.