M. gave me [what is now] his last novel for my birthday this year. I haven't started it; I'm stuck in a very long history of postwar Europe. But the next book is always in my mind, and this was foremost, even as I heard the news report that Mailer had died. The commenter they had on dismissed most of his oeuvre, with the exception of "The Naked & The Dead", and "The Executioner's Song" and his other, more journalistic work, but singled out "Why Are We in Vietnam?" as especially notable, mainly because it wasn't about Vietnam or why "we" were there, but about what it meant to be a white man in America at a particular time when such questions had to be asked, a kind of "end of history" (a la Fukuyama) moment, not only for white men in America but for such questions. I thought about "The Deer Park," then, mainly because I'd never have read it without your insistence, but also because I think the assessment of Mailer's output failed, in the end, precisely because it so easily dismissed so much of it, was so quick to understand him. But look: his death was big enough to mean something even on the other side of the world, someplace where his questions probably still need to be asked.
I'm hard pressed to think of an American writer alive today who will merit the sort of coverage in death that Mailer is getting. He may have been the last of them.
After we went to see him at the 92nd Street Y I meant to read "Harlot's Ghost". He'd read something from it, and it was pretty terrific. By that time it was out in paper, and I didn't want a paperback, because I knew a book that size would fall apart before I finished reading it. I couldn't find a hardcover, though, and so I never got to it. I'll have to renew my search, I guess.
Thanks for giving some well written relevance to the death of a great American writer. Apart from the Internet, the media covered it as an "O well " afterthought. Although Gay Talese and Philip Gourevich struggled within their allotted ten minutes to note his passing on Newshour.
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