Norman Mailer has a lot to say about the relationship between literature and the media. Although coverage of his domestic dramas and literary feuds has often overshadowed his prize-winning writing, Mailer has continued throughout more than a half-century to produce ground-breaking work as a novelist, essayist and, at times, a journalist.
He burst on the literary scene in 1948 with the explosive World War II novel “The Naked and the Dead,” followed by “Armies in the Night,” which won him the Pulitzer Prize in General Non-fiction. In 1979, he published “ The Executioner’s Song,” a masterpiece of creative non-fiction, which also won him a Pulitzer. His latest books are “The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing,” published last year on his 80th birthday; “Why Are We At War?”, a polemic against George W. Bush and the war in Iraq, published in April, and the very modest “Modest Gifts,” a whimsical paperback of his poems and drawings, published in November.
“The Spooky Art,” a pastiche of advice gleaned from over 50 years of the author’s interviews and writings on writing, is brutally harsh toward book critics (“It probably takes 20 years to appreciate book reviewing for what it is … a primitive rite”) and deliciously Maileresque (“I’d never dream, however, of not reading reviews. It would be like not looking at a naked woman if she happens to be standing in front of her open window. Whether ugly or lovely, she is undeniably interesting under the circumstances.”). It manages to describe brilliantly the simultaneous terror and exhilaration of writing.