Reviews 'I Want to Go Ahead and Do It By JOAN DIDION The Executioner's Song By Norman Mailer t is one of those testimonies to the tenacity of self-regard in the literary life that large numbers of people remain persuaded that Norman Mailer is no better than their reading of him. They condescend to him, they dismiss his most original work in favor of the more literal and predictable rhythms of "The Armies of the Night"; they regard "The Naked and the Dead" as a promise later broken and every book since as a quick turn for his creditors, a stalling action, a spangled substitute, "tarted up to deceive, for the "big book" he cannot write. In fact he has written this "big book" at least three times now. He wrote it the first time in 1955 with "The Deer Park" and he wrote it a second time in 1963 with "An American Dream" and he wrote it a third time in 1967 with "Why Are We in Vietnam?" and now, with "The Executioner's Song," he has probably written it a fourth.

"The Executioner's Song" did not suggest, in its inception, the book it became. It began as a project put together by Lawrence Schiller, the photographer and producer who several years before had contracted with Mailer to write "Marilyn," and it was widely referred to as "the Gary Gilmore book." This "Gary Gilmore book" of Mailer's was understood in a general way to be an account of or a contemplation on the death or the life or the last nine months in the life of Gary Mark Gilmore, those nine months representing the period between the day in April of 1976 when he was released from the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, and the morning in January of 1977 on which he was executed by having four shots fired into his heart at the Utah State Prison at Point of the Mountain, Utah. It seemed one of those lives in which the narrative would yield no further meaning. Gary Gilmore had been in and out of prison, mostly in, for 22 of his 36 years. Gary Gilmore had a highly developed kind of con style that caught the national imagination.

"Unless it's a joke or something, I want to go ahead and do it," Gary Gilmore said when he refused legal efforts to reverse the jury's verdict of death on felony murder. "Let's do it," Gary Gilmore said in the moments before the hood was lowered and the muzzles of the rifles emerged from the executioner's blind. Gary Gilmore's execution in 1977 was the first in the United States in ten years, and the last months of his life were expensively, exhaustively covered, covered in teams, covered in packs, covered with checkbooks and covered with tricks, covered to that point at which Louis Nirer was calling Provo in a failed attempt to add some class to David Susskind's bid for the rights, covered to that pitch at which the coverage itself might have seemed the only story. What Mailer could make of this apparently intractable material was unclear.

It might well have been only another test hole in a field he had drilled before, a few further reflections on murder as an existential act, an appropriation for himself of the book he invented for "An American Dream," Stephen Rojack's "The Psychology of the Hangman." Instead Mailer wrote a novel, a thousand-page novel in a meticulously limited vocabulary and a voice as flat as the horizon, a novel which takes for its incident and characters real events in the lives of real people. "The Executioner's Song" is ambitious to the point of vertigo, and the exact extent of its ambitiousness becomes clear at the end of the first chapter, when a curious sentence occurs, a sentence designed as a kind of Gothic premonition. Brenda Nicol, a forthright woman in her thirties who "hadn't gone into marriage four times without knowing she was pretty attractive on the hoof," has gotten a call from the penitentiary at Marion saying that her cousin Gary Gilmore was coming home--by way of St. Louis, Denver, Salt Lake--to Provo.

"With all the excitement," Chapter One of "The Executioner's Song" closes, "Brenda was hardly taking into account that it was practically the same route their Mormon great-grandfather took when he jumped off from Missouri with a handcart near to a hundred years ago, and pushed west with all he owned over the prairies, and the passes of the Rockies, to come to rest at Provo in the Mormon Kingdom of Deseret just fifty miles below Salt Lake." Against the deliberately featureless simple sentences of "The Executioner's Song," sentences that slide over the mind like conversations at K-Mart ("Gary was kind of quiet. There was one reason they got along. Brenda was always gabbing and he was a good listener. They had a lot of fun. Even at that age he was real polite."), the relative complexity and length of this sentence at the end of Chapter One is a chill, a signal that the author is telling us a story of some historical dimension.

Notice the intake of breath on the clause "and the passes of the Rockies," notice the long unbroken exhalation that ends in a fall on "just 50 miles below Salt Lake." It is a largely unremarked fact about Mailer that he is a great and obsessed stylist, a writer to whom the shape of the sentence is the story. His sentences do not get long or short by accident, or because he is in a hurry. Where he does or does not put the comma is a question of considerable concern to him: his revisions on "The Deer Park" are instructive in the extreme. Brenda Nicol may not have been taking into account that handcart, those prairies, those passes of the Rockies, but Mailer was, and, in that one sentence, the terms of the novel had laid themselves out: a connection would be attempted here, a search for a field of negative energy linking these events and these people and the empty melancholy of the place itself. "The Executioner's Song," then, was to be a novel of the West, and the strongest voices in it, as in the place itself, would be those women. Men tend to shoot, get shot, push off, move on.

Women pass down stories. "Well, I am the daughter of the very first people who settled in Provo," Gary Gilmore's mother, Bessie Gilmore, said once to herself when Gary was 22 and sentenced to 15 years for armed robbery in the state of Oregon. She said it again to herself on the July morning in 1976 when her niece Brenda and her sister Ida called to say that Gary was under arrest in Provo on Murder One, two counts. "I am the granddaughter and great granddaughter of pioneers on both sides. If they could live through it, I can live through it." This is the exact litany which expresses faith in God west of the 100th meridian. I think no one but Mailer could have dared this book. The authentic Western voice, the voice heard in "The Executioner's Song," is one heard often in life but only rarely in literature, the reason being that to truly know the West is to lack all will to write it down.

The very subject of "The Executioner's Song" is that vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience, a nihilism antithetical not only to literature but to most other forms of human endeavor, a dread so close to zero that human voices fadeout, trail off, like skywriting. Beneath what Mailer calls "the immense blue of the strong sky of the American West," under that immense blue which dominates "The Executioner's Song," not too much makes a difference. The place at which both Gary Gilmore and his Mormon great-grandfather came to rest was a town where the desert lay at the end of every street, except to the east. "There," to the east, "was the Interstate, and after that, the mountains. That was about it." In a world in which every road runs into the desert or the Interstate or the Rocky Mountains, people develop a pretty precarious sense of their place in the larger scheme. People get sick for love, think they want to die for love, shoot up the town for love, and then they move away, move on, forget the face. People commit their daughters, and move to Midway Island.

People get in their cars at night and drive across two states to get a beer, see about a loan on a pickup, keep from going crazy. It is a good idea to keep from going crazy because crazy people get committed again, and can no longer get in their cars and drive across two states to get a beer. Nicole Baker, Gary Gilmore's true love, got committed the first time at 14. April Baker, Nicole's sister, had been a "little spacey" ever since she got bad-tripped and gang-banged when her father was on leave in Honolulu. "I am a split personality," April said when she was asked about the July night in Provo when she went to the Sinclair service station and the Holiday Inn with Gary Gilmore and he seemed to kill somebody.

"I am controlling it pretty good today." "The Executioner's Song" is structured in two long symphonic movements: "Western Voices," or Book One, voices which are most strongly voices of women, and "Eastern Voices," Book Two, voices which are not literally those of Easterners but are largely those of men--the voices of the lawyers, the prosecutors, the reporters, the people who move in the larger world and believe that they can influence events. The "Western" book is a fatalistic drift, a tension, an overwhelming and passive rush toward the inevitable events that will end in Gary Gilmore's death. The "Eastern" book is the release of that tension, the resolution, the playing out of the execution, the active sequence that effectively ends on the January morning when Lawrence Schiller goes up in a six-seat plane and watches as Gary Gilmore's ashes are let loose from a plastic bag to blow over Provo. The bag surprises Schiller. The bag is a bread bag, "with the printing from the bread company clearly on it . . . a 59-cent loaf of bread." The women in the "Western" book are surprised by very little. They do not on the whole believe that events can be influenced.

A kind of desolate wind seems to blow through the lives of these women in "The Executioner's Song," all these women who have dealings with Gary Gilmore from the April night when he lands in town with his black plastic penitentiary shoes until the day in January when he is just ash blowing over Provo. The wind seems to blow away memory, balance. The sensation of falling is constant. Nicole Baker, still trying at 19 to "digest her life, her three marriages, her two kids, and more guys than you wanted to count," pits Gary Gilmore, plus Gary Gilmore's insistence that she meet him beyond the grave, reads a letter from Gary in prison and the words go "in and out of her head like a wind blowing off the top of the world." Control is fugitive. Insanity is casual. The love-death seems as good a way of hanging on as any other.

Gary and Nicole make wishes on a falling star and Nicole has "a rush of memories then like falling down in a dream." Gary's mother Bessie, sitting alone in her trailer in Oregon, gets a call about the murders from her sister Ida and she feels "vertigo at the fall through space of all those years since Ida was born." A sister-in-law of Nicole's thinks of sinking "right into the swamp of misery." A friend of the family is trying to sleep one night when she hears Gary, whose visit she has declined, shatter her car with a tire iron. "She let it go. It was just one more unhappiness at the bottom of things." These women move in and out of paying attention to events, of noticing their own fate. They seem distracted by bad dreams, by some dim apprehension of this well of dread, this "unhappiness at the bottom of things." Inside Bessie Gilmore's trailer south of the Portland city line, down a four-lane avenue of bars and eateries and discount stores and a gas station with a World War II surplus Boeing bomber fixed above the pumps, there is a sense that Bessie can describe only as "a suction-type feeling." She fears disintegration.

She wonders where the houses in which she once lived have gone, she wonders about her husband being gone, her children gone, the 78 cousins she knew in Provo scattered and gone and maybe in the ground. She wonders if, when Gary goes, they would "all descend another step into that pit where they gave up searching for one another." She has no sense of "how much was her fault, and how much was the fault of the ongoing world that ground along like iron-banded wagon wheels up the prairie grass." When I read this, I remembered that the tracks made by the wagon wheels are still visible from the air over Utah, like the footprints made on the moon. This is an absolutely astonishing book. Joan Didion is the author of "The White Album," "A Book of Common Prayer," "Play It as It Lays" and other books. Rereading: The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer | Books | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close It just starts - no throat-clearing, no overture, no vamping-until-ready.

Coming from a writer who had made his reputation slamming doors and banging about the house, leaving the television on in one sentence while simultaneously yelling abuse at the radio and bashing out power chords in another, this was of course a surprise. Also a relief and a delight. The flatness and tight-lipped quiet of The Executioner's Song after several decades of Mailer's attention-grabbing real-life excursions (stabbing a wife, running for New York mayor) and delinquent (now sliding into seniloquent) hellclub ravings is what made it so disarming, then very quickly riveting. The simple declarative sentence, hosed clean of beardy metaphors, adverbial and adjectival excess, of discursive detail and baroque, often bonkers, "existential" riffing, is something that Mailer had always seemed congenitally incapable of writing. His friend, the critic Richard Poirier, once hazarded a guess that the purpose behind Mailer's stylistic "self-pleasuring" was to excite the reader to some pitch of consciousness equivalent to Mailer's own.

As a young man, Mailer had famously said that he would settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of his time. As a result, it had been all but impossible to have a peaceful or casual relationship to his writing. Even after the most obedient attention, the reader was seldom rewarded with any sense of achieved calm. "Mailer is a writer as yet without the ultimate serenity that is probably needed for the great book he wishes to write", Poirier concluded in 1972. "When, oh when, will all the kids grow up, all the wives remarry?" Martin Amis was still wondering a decade later, shaking his head sadly over the latest Mailer-on-Marilyn money-spinner, Of Women and Their Elegance (1981). In fact, The Executioner's Song had been published in 1979. And it was apparent from the opening paragraph - even of pulse, unblinking, unworried - that here Mailer was trying something new: "Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree. She climbed to the top and the limb with the good apples broke off. Gary caught her as the branch came scraping down. They were scared.

The apple trees were their grandmother's best crop and it was forbidden to climb in the orchard. She helped him drag away the tree limb and they hoped no one would notice. That was Brenda's earliest recollection of Gary." "Gary" is the career criminal and soon-to-be-double-murderer Gary Gilmore - a "bad apple" if ever there was one. "Brenda" is his cousin - his "favourite coz" - who he was there to catch when she fell and is there for him now nearly 30 years later, happy to take Gary in and give him another chance in the security of her God-fearing Mormon family after a lifetime in reform school and jail. And for 1,050 pages, that - the reminder that good apples sometimes turn rotten, the idea that human agency can cushion and sometimes avert catastrophe, Brenda's innocent tumble flagging Gary's grim descent into the gutter - is about as overtly literary, or as metaphorical, as it gets.

Nothing writerly happens until a sudden efflorescence on page 14 - a piece of poetic interior monologue, Mailer transposing what he believes is going on inside Brenda's head: "Brenda felt as if she could pick up the quiver in each bright colour that Gary was studying on the jukebox. He looked close to being dazzled by the revolving red, blue and gold light show on the electronic screen of the cigarette console. He was so involved it drew her into his mood." The ending of The Executioner's Song, of course, is never in doubt: the death sentence passed on Gilmore, and his insistence on facing execution by firing squad, making him the first person to be executed in the United States in a decade, had been headline news around the world (and a punk rock record) only two years before the book came out. On its publication in 1979, conventional narrative tension - what will happen? how will it end? - was necessarily replaced by an altogether different kind of suspense: how would Mailer take this warmed-over material, so recently the subject of television specials and fish-wrap journalism, and make it new again?

And more: how long could he go before his old habits of embarrassing grandiloquence and associative rambling, his increasingly unchecked tendency to put "Norman Mailer" at the heart of whatever he was writing, how long before "the slumbering Beast" rose up to reinhabit him and scupper the enterprise? At the time, the omens didn't look all that promising. A few weeks before The Executioner's Song appeared, Mailer persuaded his publishers to repackage it as a novel, or rather a "true life novel", along the lines of Truman Capote's "non-fiction novel" In Cold Blood. And out of the violent mess of the Gilmore story emerged all-too-familiar Mailer tropes. There was the widely-reported fact that Gilmore had elected to die so he could save his soul, for example, and be reincarnated. And then there was the killer's concurrence with one of Norman Mailer's most frequently recurring ideas: that death is an experience of life, "perhaps the final orgasm into the future". At the time these were real concerns that made turning the pages of The Executioner's Song a white-knuckle experience.

I remember Mailer once saying that the best way to come across well on television - to remain looking halfway human, that is, in conditions designed to make the scalp boil and the ear-lobes burn and the ego sit up and demand feeding - was to cultivate an air of total, dead-eyed boredom. "Ideally, it was best to feel no more desire than a prostitute toward the 10th client of the night". In the 25 years since The Executioner's Song was published, Mailer has consistently tried to frame the writing of the book in similar terms, and relegate it to the second division of his work, the first division of course consisting of his volumes of "real" fiction. His sensitivity on this subject is clear in an exchange which took place between Mailer and the high-brahmin American poet Robert Lowell, a fellow-demonstrator on the 1967 anti-Vietnam war march on the Pentagon, which Mailer wrote up in Armies of the Night (1968), his first extended work of non-fiction. Lowell: "I really think you are the best journalist in America." Mailer: "Well ...

there are days when I think of myself as being the best writer in America." Journalism for Mailer has always been a kind of literary photography, and unbecoming to the serious writer's artistic dignity. "I think The Executioner's Song, more than any book I've ever done, was an exercise in craft", Mailer has said. "I've never felt close to it". I don't think I had heard of Raymond Carver 25 years ago when I read The Executioner's Song for the first time. (The Stories of Raymond Carver, his first collection, wasn't published in Britain until 1985). And no writer could be further distanced temperamentally, or in tone and style, from Mailer. "Yes, well, I guess they would like Raymond Carver in England", Mailer commented dismissively when I interviewed him some years ago. Carver's reputation as a minimalist (a term he hated) presented an alternative to the lusty, maximal ambitions which Mailer had always maintained were necessary to tame "The Great Bitch", as he describes the American novel in Cannibals and Christians .

And yet, rereading it now, it's Carver that The Executioner's Song irresistibly suggests, at the sentence level. Carver's ear for ordinary, defeated, working-class speech was unerrring; his immersion in the "applauseless" lives of his factory workers and cosmetics salesladies and motel managers, total. "Nothing vague or blurred, no smoked-glass prose", was Carver's prescription. And in his commitment to common language, the language of normal discourse, he was following an American tradition established by Robert Frost and, before Frost, by William Carlos Williams, the poet of inarticulate America - a poet who distrusted articulacy. "The speech of Polish mothers" was where Williams insisted he got his English from. His famous "flatness" came from the urban "work-yard" of New Jersey. But it was a strain in American writing that had always been antithetical to Mailer. Language was the chariot Mailer rode in on; it was the weapon with which he was still intent on nailing the Great Bitch and smiting the heathen.

He had to suspend work on Ancient Evenings, a big, windy, (over-) ambitious novel about serial reincarnation, set in the Egypt of 1130BC, in order to write The Executioner's Song. And the flat, blank voices of the American Midwest, the voices of the people who were related to Gary Gilmore, or whose lives were otherwise rent by being dragged into Gilmore's orbit, seem to assume an added poignancy or sense of desolation by being transcribed by a writer for whom their very flatness and blankness - positive qualities for Carver and other Dirty Realists - represents a kind of dusty-throated deprivation. Like Oswald's Tale (1995), Mailer's compelling account of President Kennedy's assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, which was also "produced" by the media hustler and long-time Mailer collaborator, Larry Schiller, The Executioner's Song is divided into two parts of equal length.

The first, "Western Voices", is a direct rendering of the murder story from the day in April 1976 when Gary Gilmore was released from the United States Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, until the morning nine months later when he was executed by having four shots fired into his heart at the Utah State Prison at Point of the Mountain, Utah. Truman Capote would later claim that Mailer had ripped off the techniques he pioneered in In Cold Blood 15 years earlier - "I do something truly innovative, and who gets the prizes? Norman Mailer!" - and he had a point: Mailer's prose is plainer-dealing, leaner, rougher-edged, but the "saturation reporting" method based on police reports, trial transcripts, tape-recorded interviews with friends and family and so on, is essentially the same. Mailer's genius in "Eastern Voices", the second part of The Executioner's Song, is to blow apart the mystique Capote cultivated as to how it's all done.

In part one Mailer wants the reader to be amazed because the density of detail and the deeply intimate nature of much that is revealed (particularly in the relationship between Gilmore and his teenage girlfriend, Nicole Barrett) seems impossible. In part two he wants the reader to be amazed again because it looks so easy. He wants the reader to be amazed twice. By 1979, the differences between the conventional practices of straight news reporting and the so-called New Journalism of Capote, Mailer, Tom Wolfe and others were well established. The newspaper reporter wrote to a for mula. He tried to fashion a clear, concise, straight news story, starting with the who, what, when, where and why of an event and proceeding toward the end by placing factual details in descending order of interest and importance - a device that ennabled readers to grasp the essentials immediately and editors to cut stories from the bottom up. His job was to try to hold a mirror up to an event and show its surface. There was zero interpretation. The Capotes and Wolfes, on the other hand, enjoyed the luxury of time: they could hang around until people had forgotten they were there, then creep up on reality with its pants around its ankles.

The New Journalist could build up scenes and develop characters; they could even give the sense of being inside a character's consciousness. They could write non-fiction "like a novel". That much was known, if still contested. What remained unknown and decidedly murky were the often sleazy details of the chequebook journalism and ruthless wheeler-dealing that went into securing exclusives and buying up stories. The naked horse-trading, in other words, that allowed the writers to cosy up to their subjects, drain them dry and then show a clean pair of heels. Enter Larry Schiller. Part of Truman Capote's beef against Mailer was that, whereas he, Capote, had spent six months interrogating "his" killers, keeping them sweet with comic books and cookies, Mailer hadn't so much as been in the same execution chamber as Gary Gilmore. What Capote failed to take into account was that Mailer had a surrogate - an aide-de-camp and amanuensis - in Larry Schiller.

Known as "the journalist who dealt in death" because of the way he had bought his way into stories on people such as Oswald's killer, Jack Ruby, and the Manson family, Schiller is the kind of behemoth character - still fairly freakish then, much less exotic now - who could only exist in the novels of Dickens and the corporate hospitality facilities of late-20th-century America. The eastern voices in part two of The Executioner's Song are the voices of lawyers, prosecutors, TV anchors, reporters, media monkeys ("There were going to be a lot of monkeys in that zoo"). And the loudest, most colourful and most idiosyncratic of these (as well as, in a strange way, the least deceived) is Mailer's helpmeet Larry Schiller's. Instead of being repelled by it, as I should have been, I found, instead, that I wanted to draw closer. On January 2 1981 I was on the final pages of The Executioner's Song, which I had read at a gallop. Around tea-time it came on the television that they had arrested a man in Sheffield in connection with the Yorkshire Ripper murders.

Forty-eight hours later I was in the bar of the Norfolk Gardens Hotel in Bradford listening to claim and counter-claim about who had "got his chequebook out" for Peter Sutcliffe's father or "locked up" the brother, making notes towards Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son, a book for which Norman Mailer would generously volunteer a quote when it was published in America. In 1995, when I came to write Fullalove, my second novel, "Norman Miller", a tabloid hack specialising in murder, meets his near-namesake, Mailer at the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle" in Zaire. A telling phrase crops up at key moments in both Oswald's Tale and The Executioner's Song. Having secured worldwide motion picture and publication rights in his true life story, including exclusive syndication on his love letters, suicide notes and family pictures, and having promised to scatter his ashes in the skies over Utah, Larry Schiller approaches Gilmore to say a final farewell before the execution: "He grasped both of Gilmore's hands ...

and he said, he heard it come out of him, 'I don't know what I'm here for'." "Why are you here, they [the KGB officers in Minsk] would ask", Mailer writes in Oswald's Tale. "What do you expect to find?" In both cases the answer is simple: material for two books that are to be counted not only among the very best that one of America's best writers has written, but can also claim a place among the most impressive books published by any American in recent years. The puzzle is why this continues to be a truth that seems self-evident to almost everybody except Norman Mailer. · Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song is published by Vintage at £10.99. To order a copy for £8.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son and Fullalove by Gordon Burn are published by Faber. To order for £8.99 and £7.99 with free p&p call Guardian book service.

The executioner's song (Book, 1979) [WorldCat.org] Find more libraries Librarian? Claim your library to The executioner's song Print book : Fiction : English View all editions and formats Database: WorldCat Summary: Reconstructs the crime and fate of Gary Gilmore, the convicted murderer who sought his own execution in Utah, based on taped interviews with relatives, friends, lawyers, and law-enforcement officials. In what is arguably his greatest book--written in 1979 and reissued here in trade paperback--America's most heroically ambitious writer follows the short, blighted career of Gary Gilmore, an intractably violent product of America's prisons who--after robbing two men and killing them in cold blood--insisted on dying for his crime. Read more... You are connected to the University of Washington Libraries network Hide local services for this item OCLC FirstSearch Add library to Favorites Please choose whether or not you want other users to be able to see on your profile that this library is a favorite of yours. Allow this favorite library to be seen by others Keep this favorite library private Find a copy in the library Finding libraries that hold this item...

Details Gary Gilmore; Gary Gilmore; Gary Gilmore; Gary Gilmore Material Type: First British edition according to Zempel. Awards: Winner of Pulitzer Prize Novel Category 1980. Winner of Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1980. Description: Norman Mailer. Abstract: Reconstructs the crime and fate of Gary Gilmore, the convicted murderer who sought his own execution in Utah, based on taped interviews with relatives, friends, lawyers, and law-enforcement officials. In what is arguably his greatest book--written in 1979 and reissued here in trade paperback--America's most heroically ambitious writer follows the short, blighted career of Gary Gilmore, an intractably violent product of America's prisons who--after robbing two men and killing them in cold blood--insisted on dying for his crime. Reviews Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers. Be the first. Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers. Be the first. Tags Add tags for "The executioner's song". Be the first.

Similar Items Executioners Song: Norman Mailer: Trade Paperback: 9780375700811: Powell's Books Executioners Song Ships in 1 to 3 days Qty Winner of the 1980 Pulitzer Prize Synopses & Reviews Publisher Comments In what is arguably his greatest book, written in 1979, America's most heroically ambitious writer follows the short, blighted career of Gary Gilmore, an intractably violent product of America's prisons who  after robbing two men and killing them in cold blood  insisted on dying for his crime. To do so, he had to fight a system that seemed intent on keeping him alive long after it had sentenced him to death. Norman Mailer tells Gilmore's story  and those of the men and women caught up in his procession toward the firing squad  with implacable authority, steely compassion, and a restraint that evokes the parched landscapes and stern theology of Gilmore's Utah. The Executioner's Song is a towering achievement, impossible to put down, impossible to forget.

Review "The big book no one but Mailer could have dared...absolutely astonishing." Joan Didion, The New York Times Book Review Review "Literature of the highest order." Miami Herald Review "A harrowing account...elevated by Mailer's genius into art." Houston Chronicle About the Author Norman Mailer was born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. In 1955, he was one of the co-founders of The Village Voice. He is the author of more than thirty books, including The Naked and the Dead; The Armies of the Night, for which he won a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; The Executioner's Song, for which he won his second Pulitzer Prize; Harlot's Ghost; Oswald's Tale; The Gospel According to the Son, The Castle and the Forest and On God. He died in 2007.

5 1 National Book Critics Circle: Eleven Things You Need to Know About Executioner’s Song - Critical Mass Blog Eleven Things You Need to Know About Executioner’s Song by Marc Weingarten | Nov-17-2007 The following post from NBCC member Marc Weingarten concludes the In Retrospect series look back at Norman Mailer and "Executioner's Song," his 1979 nonfiction novel which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. 1) When Norman Mailer in the late 70’s embarked on the work that would turn into The Executioner’s Song, he really didn’t have any idea where the project might take him. This book wasn’t supposed to be one of those epoch-defining projects that was going to clean out the marrow of the body politic, a book that would give the Nobel committee no choice but to nominate him for the prize. At this point, Mailer was taking on quite a bit of work for-hire, and he had already felt like a whore for writing Marilyn, the coffee table book about Marilyn Monroe for which he had been paid the (then) princely sum of $50,000.

That book had caused no small source of embarrassment for him. When Time magazine published a cover photo of Mailer’s picture superimposed over the naked movie star, he had turned to his collaborator Lawrence Schiller and exclaimed, “Now I’ll never win the Nobel prize.” 2) Mailer had Larry Schiller to thank for the quick money gigs, but without Schiller, one of Mailer’s greatest books wouldn’t have been written. Schiller was a tireless researcher with big ideas for turning his sweat equity into real money, but even he admitted that he wasn’t the greatest writer. He needed others to turn his notions into gold. 3)When Gary Gilmore was awaiting trial for the murder of two men in Provo, Utah in 1976, Schiller pounced. He high-tailed it down there with a tape recorder and fistfuls of cash. He talked to Gilmore, his girlfriend Nicole, family members, the cops, the prosecution and the defense attorneys – just about everyone who had come into contact with Gilmore. He had many hundreds of hours of tape transcripts, but no organizing principle, no way to shape it into a coherent narrative.

4)Mailer entered into an agreement with Schiller, and the two sold the book to Little, Brown for $25,000. Warner books bought the paperback rights for $500,000. A movie deal was also brokered. 5)It’s a bad book if you really want to know what Mailer is all about as a writer and a thinker. With The Executioner’s Song, Mailer had something to prove – he wanted to invert his complex style into something so plain a child could parse it. He also wanted to silence the critics who felt that Mailer could write only one way, in a self-referential rococo sprint. By eliminating the complex syntax, the serpentine sentence structure, the recondite vocabulary, Mailer had finally gotten as close to his hero Hemingway as he had ever come: Conveying the anguish of being a man without resorting to anguished language. 6)It’s a good book if you want to understand one of the major preoccupations of Mailer’s career – how violence can be bound up with an impulse to make whole a fractured personality.

Gary Gilmore is a man who has been made into an animal (or the animal begat the man – it’s for the reader to decide), having spent most of his adult life in jail. The release of his violent energies is an eruption of displaced passion from a man who can’t logically compartmentalize those passions. The genius of the book is that Mailer can have us believe that a killer is also a complex and nuanced man worthy of our attention across 1,000 pages. 7) It is better than In Cold Blood. Mailer had the goods on Gilmore on just about every aspect of his life, thanks to Larry Schiller, and that included a pile of correspondence that Gilmore wrote to Nicole while he was incarcerated. So Mailer presents another paradox – a killer who is a sensitive, courtly and solicitous lover, capable of great depths of feeling. These letters are so beautiful that it’s remarkable to think Mailer didn’t have any hand in them. Capote had Dick and Perry, but Mailer had a riveting love story, and that makes The Executioner’s Song a superior book 8)Mailer leaves himself out of it, for the most part.

Instead Larry Schiller is the intrepid reporter, but his fact-gaterhing is tainted by self-interest. Schiller winds up compromising himself, but without any remorse. He offers money to potential subjects who might talk about Gilmore and Nicole, he tries to broker a sale of Gilmore’s letters, he enters into an agreement with a local journalist in order to sniff out government information. By writing about all of this at great length, Mailer is absolutely prescient in describing the sick co-dependency between the press and the news stories they’re supposed to be covering, but are in fact manipulating. 9)Gilmore wants to be executed. That’s the great narrative driver in the book, even though we know all of this before we even crack the book’s spine. It doesn’t matter. Mailer devotes hundreds of pages to the legal contortions that Federal and State lawmakers endure in order to ensure due process. This stuff is as gripping as any crime novel procedural by Scott Turow or anyone else. How many stays of execution are recounted in The Executioner’s Song? I lost track when I first read it. Can’t a man who has been sentenced to die comply with the order if he so chooses? Apparently not.

Is the legal system in this country dysfunctional? Apparently so. 10) To process hundreds of hours of interviews, scores of documents, intricate and intimate details of plot and chronology into a coherent narrative is a brilliant feat of reportage. To bring Gary Gilmore back from the dead as a divided soul worthy of a Dostoevsky novel is a literary achievement of the first order. 11) You MUST READ THIS BOOK! --Marc Weingarten About this Post "Eleven Things You Need to Know About Executioner’s Song" was posted November 17, 2007 and written by admin. Categories: The Executioner’s Song. | Raptis Rare Books The Executioner’s Song. Item Number: 3227 Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979. First edition of arguably the author’s finest work, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. Octavo, original blue cloth. Signed by Norman Mailer on the title page. Some soiling to the textblock, a very good copy in a near fine dust jacket. Out of stock Email ThisProduct Other Books by this Author The Naked and the Dead. London: Allan Wingate, 1949.

First British edition of the author’s first book. Octavo, original cloth. Lengthily inscribed by Mailer, For ________ ________, Spent a winter once in Jamaica, Vermont, back in 1949, Loved it. Cheers Norman Mailer.” Price: $1,500.00 The Executioner’s Song. Boston: Little Brown, 1979. First edition. Thick octavo, original cloth. Signed by Norman Mailer on the title page. Some spotting to the page edges, very good in a very good price-clipped dust jacket with some rubbing and wear. Price: $300.00 The Naked and the Dead. New York: Rinehart and Company, 1948. First edition of the author’s first book. Thick octavo, original black boards. Inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper to journalist Joe Haas, "For Joe Haas in Jamaica after our Lady Norman Mailer May 1969." Some of the usual rubbing to the boards, near fine in a very good first issue price-clipped dust jacket with light wear to the extremities.

Price: $2,500.00 The Executioner's Song: Norman Mailer: 9780375700811: Literature: Amazon Canada By molochai@home.com on Oct. 4 1998 Format: Paperback This novel seems to have received mixed reviews from Mailer fans. On the one hand, it's a 1000+ page book written in an unpoetic, detached style; but it's also a story about an incredibly tragic, weak man whose one redeeming act was his realization that he deserved to die. Perhaps this book will make you hate Gary Gilmore, maybe make you pity him, but any reader can see after reading this book that this murderer was jarringly close to being a regular guy. Sure, there's the whole killing thing... but otherwise one must admit to oneself that the line between a cold-blooded murderer and everybody else is a little blurry. As for Mailer's style, the subject of the book facilitates a cool, objective narration; the surgeon-like detail, precision and sterility serve as sort of an ironic commentary on Gilmore's life.

It was nowhere as tedious, however, as some other "true-life crime" books I've read where every other sentence is dedicated to meaningless facts; how many centimeters deep a stab wound was, and so forth. Anyway, if you can sit through a book for several weeks, this one is worth it. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again. By Z. Blume on June 7 2004 Format: Paperback This is an excellent true crime book, despite Mailer's verbosity and arrogant style. Gary Gilmore--a bright man who spent half his life in jail and eventually murdered two men in cold blood while on parole before being given a death sentance--is a fascinating example of a modern criminal. His life before his final crime and then his court battles to speed up his execution is an interesting case study and since this book is written like an extended newspaper article, it provides great insight. It also contains terrific accounts of the other tragic characters in Gilmore's life (his mother, father and girlfriend). The big fault of this book, of course, is its overwhelming length.

There is no reason it needed to be over 1000 pages and after finishing it I was more than ready for it to be over. There is enough drama and action to keep the narrative flowing and to keep readers interested, but it isn't a book you can sit down and read in an afternoon, you will have to devote serious time and energy to finish it. I think the effort is worth it, but for people who do not want to commit to such an endeavor, do not read this book and buy the book by Mikal Gilmore (Gary's younger brother) or avoid Gilmore all together and buy In Cold Blood, which is a must read book and the best true crime I've ever read. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again. By kristin L fox on Oct. 4 2001 Format: Paperback I first read the Executioner's Song several years ago and was fascinated by it then. I have just read it again and the same holds true now. Nothing that I have ever read before compares with this book.

The true account of Gary Gilmore and those who's lives he forever affected will leave you literally haunted. The true story of one man's attempt to reintroduce himself into society after half a lifetime locked away in the prison system only to commit double murder a short time after he is out of prison. And his personal battle to make the State of Utah execute him only nine months after he was let out of prison is a tragic and gripping portrayal of American History. Norman Mailer's delivery of this story is more like a window into the actual lives of Gary Gilmore and his girlfriend Nicole. It's not like your reading a book but rather being transported into their realm. I at times found myself completely depressed when reading certain parts of the book. I had to put it down for a time because it was upsetting. The book contains themes that deal with religion, sexual abuse, human rights, the law, suicide, love, and manipulation just to name a few. I came away with the sense that I knew these people intimately. that I knew their friends and family members.I was caught up in the inner turmoil of the ill fated lovers Gary and Nicole.

The last half of the book chronicals the lives of the lawyers, people who worked for the ACLU, and others who become involved with Gary. At times there are so many people involved in the circus like atmosphere that surrounds the case that you easily forget who is who.But this book is based on reality and these people all played a part in the case. Some large and some small. This book is a keeper for one's bookshelf. An outstanding piece of American Literature from a gifted writer. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again. By C. McDanel on July 17 2001 Format: Paperback Normally, once I read a paperback I pass it on for others to read. I have enough books in my house that I don't normally hang onto any paperbacks. This book is the one exception. I wouldn't part with it. Mailer delivers a top notch story about a true event. Gary Gilmore is not the type of person I think I would ever want to invite home, but I had definite mixed feelings about his execution.

I was glad he got what he wanted, I agree that justice was served, but I also feel it was the waste of what might have been a valuable life. Of course, all life is valuable and Gilmore killed two young promising men. As you can tell, this book left me with some conflicting feelings. Mailer gives us an unvarnished picture of the events that lead to Gilmore's execution. The development of the many characters is convincing, believable and in-depth. Unlike many true life stories, Mailer writes the book so that it reads like fiction. There are some instances of courtroom-like dialogue but the majority of this massive book flows like fiction. A fine example that life can be more interesting than the best fiction, but it takes a great author to do it. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again.

Question: Who wrote the 1979 novel ‘The Executioner’s Song’?
Answer: Norman Mailer