I can’t really say anything about Norman Mailer or his death because I never read anything by him, nor was ever tempted to do until now. To post something now just because the man died recently seems a bit too bandwagonesque, so I won’t say anything about it. The only thing what I do want to comment on is that if both Roy Edroso and Ellis Sharp recommend the same novel, it must have something going for it. Here’s first Ellis, then Roy on cite>Why Are We in Vietnam?.
It’s too early to assess Mailer’s career either in itself or in relation to his contemporaries (it will take thirty or forty years for the noise to die down and the vested interests to fade). That said, it’s middle period Mailer that interests me the most. Did he ever achieve his ambition of writing a novel which fused those electrifying influences set out above? Yes, I believe he did. It may be significant that he did so in a book which is not only his shortest novel (143 pages in my Panther edition) but also perhaps his least typical: Why Are We in Vietnam? It is a narrative which repeatedly contemplates its own making, through a voice which fractures and takes on a dizzying variety of registers. The cover blurb heartily proclaims it Rabelaisian (preparing the reader for Mailer’s interest in assholes, dicks and bodily matters) but at times it reminds me of Joyce; at others of later James Ellroy.
[….]
Critics generally prefer Mailer’s more disciplined books like The Executioner’s Song and Harlot’s Ghost, in which Mailer’s madness is a thrumming engine set safely deep inside the work, sending energy steadily up into the well-ordered prose, with sudden power surges occasionally electrifying the surface. In passages like this one, we see what Mailer was like when nothing was stopping him. It’s the first Mailer book that grabbed me, and I still like it. There’s glory in it as well as absurdity; it’s compelling and not quite convincing; it is colloquial without being conversational. It is inventive to a fault.
I just might look out in the local library for that one.