Fighting for One's Fiction: How Norman Mailer Taught Me to Defend My Plots
Anthony Giardina's Literary Hub essay revisiting Advertisements for Myself — especially the 'Last Draft of The Deer Park' section — as a meditation on literary ambition and the diminished cultural stakes of the novel. An about-Mailer clipping.
Read an excerpt (rights pending)
Anthony Giardina. “Fighting for One’s Fiction: How Norman Mailer Taught Me to Defend My Plots.” Literary Hub, 2 April 2025. https://lithub.com/fighting-for-ones-fiction-how-norman-mailer-taught-me-to-defend-my-plots/
Occasioned by the publication of his own sixth novel, Giardina returns to Advertisements for Myself (1959) and especially its “Fourth Advertisement for Myself: The Last Draft of The Deer Park,” Mailer’s account of the rejection and rewriting of The Deer Park. He reads Mailer’s “fighterly” vulnerability — the dread of “taking a beating” from a venerable bank of critics — as a record of a vanished world in which the novel, and the novelist’s public judgment, still mattered, and wonders whether novelists’ own retreat into “chamber music” explains their cultural diminishment.