TOUGH GUY

Contentious biography of acclaimed, controversial novelist Norman Mailer (1923-2007).

One need not like—or even respect—one’s subject to write a biography, else the Hitler shelves would be bare. However, British academic Bradford seems to thrive only when sniping, deriding perceived flaws of style and soul, and discovering where the feet of clay are planted, as with his recent attempted takedown of Patricia Highsmith. Here, he wrestles with a man who “served more as a cook than as a combatant” in the Pacific in World War II and therefore, presumably, should not have written The Naked and the Dead. Mailer’s second book, The Barbary Shore, “a naïve, self-absorbed portrait of American left-leaning politics set in a Brooklyn rooming house, achieved the unenviable status of being scorned by almost every critic who reviewed it,” and The Deer Park “was subjected to similar derision.” Few of Bradford’s observations are particularly original—he relies heavily on other secondary sources—but occasionally, he hits on a good one. For example, he notes that “Mailer would spend most of his life involved in relentless attempts to spread consternation….He would become a chameleon, choosing to bludgeon the truth into what he thought suitable for the occasion, usually involving an attempt to shock.” More often, Bradford falls into Albert Goldman–esque sanctimony, as when he writes of Mailer’s infamous essay “The White Negro,” “All that prevailed when he put together this horrible accident of prose writing was his ego. He wanted fame and he was determined to shock.” True, but perhaps Mailer also wanted to call out the hyperconformity of the racist-to-the-bone era, however ham-fisted the result. What about when Mailer got it right? Then, to name one instance, “critics who saw themselves as occupying the intellectual high ground celebrated The Executioner’s Song.” It all seems a pointless exercise, but superciliousness is the coin of this particular critical realm.

Of quaternary rank in the library of work devoted to Mailer.