Norman Writes a Dithyramb
Anatole Broyard's 'Books of The Times' review of The Prisoner of Sex in the New York Times (27 May 1971). Broyard calls it Mailer's best book — his most intimate testament — even while granting how easy Mailer is to ridicule. An about-Mailer review.
Anatole Broyard. “Norman Writes a Dithyramb.” The New York Times, 27 May 1971, p. 37.
A “Books of The Times” review of The Prisoner of Sex (Little, Brown). Broyard’s verdict is admiring without being uncritical — “it is just as easy to ridicule Norman Mailer as it is to admire him,” and Mailer, he says, “advises us to do both.” He reads the book past its origins as a reply to Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, defending its argument that the “technologizing of sex” threatens “naturalness,” praising the passages on Henry Miller and D. H. Lawrence, and concluding that it is “Mailer’s best book … the most intimate, inclusive and deeply felt of all” — finally “a love poem.”