The American Century: Literature since 1945 571much of it is taken up with the account of a larger-than-life hunting trip which
recalls other, legendary hunting trips in the fiction of Cooper, Hemingway, and
Faulkner. And all of it is written in a wild, surreal idiom that replicates the patter of
American disc jockeys. What the book circulates around, in fact, both in its use
of American mythic material, and its play with the nervy, syncopated language of
the American media, is power on a national level – and, given the emergence of the
American empire, on an international level as well.
What Why Are We in Vietnam? also suggests is the willingness of its author to
incorporate fact and dream, the documentary and the demonic modes, in his
imaginative investigation of power. It may be a war novel of a kind, but that is a very
different kind from The Naked and the Dead which, for all Mailer’s talk of it as a
parable, is clearly in the tradition of American naturalism. In an essay titled
“The White Negro” (1957), Mailer wrote that no matter how terrifying the twentieth
century was, it was exciting “for its tendency to reduce all life to its ultimate
alternatives.” These alternatives were, for him, a matter of writerly practice as much
as existential choice: his work moved on two rivers, at least, as it attempted to explore
the two rivers of American history. A master storyteller in the realist and naturalist
vein, Mailer also excelled at the new journalism, a form he helped to create, which
takes actual events and submits them to imaginative transformation. Armies of the
Night, for instance, which is subtitled “History as a Novel, The Novel as History,”
has as its subject a 1967 protest march on the Pentagon. Miami and the Siege of
Chicago (1969) deals with the Republican and Democratic conventions of 1968;
The Prisoner of Sex (1971) is Mailer’s encounter with feminism; Marilyn: A Biography
(1973) is a study of the life and meaning of Marilyn Monroe; and The Executioner’s
Song (1979) is at once an account of the events surrounding the execution of the
convicted killer Gary Gilmore and an investigation into the roots of American
violence. An essay like “The White Negro,” in turn, shows Mailer becoming part of
the beat movement, calling on his contemporaries to resist corporate America and
pursue a radical, more spontaneous alternative. Of Women and Their Elegance (1980)
returns to Marilyn Monroe, whom Mailer sees as both an American icon and an
embodiment of the power and potential corruptibility of sex; but this time in the
form of fantasy, an “imaginary memoir” of the star. And Ancient Evenings (1983),
set in ancient Egypt, has a protagonist who is reborn three times, as he rises from a
peasant childhood to become an advisor to the pharaohs. The power explored
here is that of the body and the body politic, certainly, but it is also the power of
mystery and magic – among other things, what the protagonist calls the magical
“power to father oneself.”
The last three novels Mailer completed continued to mix the fictional and the
historical and to develop his preoccupation with power deployed for good, evil, or
both. Harlot’s Ghost (1991) tells the story of Harry Hubbard, a former CIA agent.
A fascinating generic hybrid that includes both real people and fictional characters,
it is at once a thriller, a romance, a character study, and an investigation of the CIA.
The Gospel According to the Son (1999) sticks more closely to recorded events – in
this case, the four canonical gospels – in retelling the story of Christ from his ownGGray_c05.indd 571ray_c 05 .indd 571 8 8/1/2011 7:31:32 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 32 PM