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 A DIALOGUE ON MAILER’S NOVELS
R O B E R T J . B E G I E B I N G A N DP H I L I P B U F I T H I S
 Mailer’s nonfiction has been honored with praises and prizes. One might sen-sibly argue that it contributed to a revolution in the consciousness of his time.But his fiction is still a matter of vigorous debate, and the Mailer Question per-sists. Simply put: How good are his novels? Two Mailer scholars having drinksand dinner two years ago in Provincetown discussed the Question. The night wore on, the restaurant closed, but their discussion continued in the months that  followed and developed into this dialogue. It opens with two overview state-ments on Mailer the novelist, debates three novels, then assesses Mailer’s other novels starting with
The Naked and the Dead
.
Bufithis:
Norman Mailer’s career as a literary celebrity clouded his stand-ing as an authentic artist.An accurate measure of that standing depends onhow we judge his novels. Ranging from realistic to mythopoetic, they com-prise an adventurous body of work.And Mailer is an impressive prose styl-ist. But how high is the evaluation we can finally apply to his novelisticachievement? Mailer himself sets the measure when he says,“For if I haveone ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoyevsky andMarx;Joyce and Freud;Stendhal,Tolstoy,Proust and Spengler;Faulkner,andeven old moldering Hemingway might come to read,for it would carry whatthey had to tell another part of the way.”To rank Mailer among the masters,which he invites us to do,is to recog-nize that on the whole his fiction presents more sensation than substance.We see an abundant vitality in the service of rebellion, but rebellion is notconstruction.He seldom substantially portrays the meaningful life his com-bativeness supposedly moves toward.Indeed,against the violence and powerof the State or the corporation, Mailer’s protagonists exert their own vio-
THE MAILER REVIEW, VOL.
2
,
NO.
1
,
FALL
2008
. Copyright ©
2008
. The Norman MailerSociety. Published by The Norman Mailer Society.
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