Norman Mailer died this morning. Too late to make the Washington Post print edition, but the news was all over the Internet when I got up. He was 84 and died of renal failure.
In a way, it’s an end-of-era moment. Mailer was frequently a clown and almost always wrongheaded politically, but he was also something much more important to his century: he was probably the last living writer who aspired to write the Great American Novel. In the 1940s that was something every young writer wanted to do. But today’s young writers aim to write movie screenplays and journalism; the idea of the Big Novel is pretty much dead, and as a matter of fact shortly before he died, Mailer conjectured in an interview that the novel itself, as a form, is on the way out. Could be; in another context he lamented declining interest in serious fiction in the country at large, and Mailer’s lifelong antagonist Gore Vidal has estimated the audience for serious literary fiction in America these days at something like 4,000 people. There will be no more aspiring young Hemingways, the thing Mailer himself was in his youth, along with so many others.
In the spring of 1995, Mailer came to Washington, D.C. on a tour to promote the book he had just published about Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy. I was in the audience at Olsson's Books, Metro Center that day (Olsson's Books is now long-gone), and I raised my hand and asked him if there was going to be a sequel to Harlot's Ghost, his 1991 novel about the CIA. My reason for asking was because Harlot's Ghost had concluded with the words, "To Be Continued." "Time, energy and money permitting, yes," Mailer answered my question. "I think the story of Harlot's Ghost is an important one that deserves to be continued." No sequel ever appeared, and I'm not surprised. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that there are no second acts in American life; there were few if any sequels in Mailer's. Married six times, the father of nine children, and with a Manhattan rent to pay, he churned from one big-money journalism project to the next, with fiction squeezed in between gigs. He was primarily more journalist than novelist anyway, just as Hemingway was, in my opinion, more short-story writer than novelist.
It's not surprising that Mailer failed to write the Great American Novel, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered much if he had; it would no longer have been recognized as such once the Newsweek front cover had faded, and would have been on remainder tables within 12 months. Yes, we still have our serious writers, the Cormac McCarthys and Don DeLillos, but they play to small audiences and no one would recognize either of them if he walked into Starbucks. Mailer was the last American author who conceived of the writer’s role in society as a big one, who openly boasted that he wanted to be as big as Dostoevski. Such bravado often made him look silly and certainly brought its share of ridicule on his head, but I already miss the world in which someone could aspire to be as big as Dostoevski to begin with. These days everyone wants to be as big as Paris Hilton or Tupac Shakir.
When he published Ancient Evenings in 1984, Mailer told an interviewer that he had written a novel set in ancient Egypt because he felt so completely a stranger in Ronald Reagan’s America. I doubt that that was the real reason. I always suspected that he wrote that novel because he wanted to prove that he could "do" historical fiction as well as his old rival Vidal. But the remark had a certain prescience, given the fact that America became progressively more and more a strange land in the years after Reagan to someone with Mailer’s youthful dreams and priorities, and I had those same dreams myself when I was young; as late as 1976 I, too, dreamed of being the next Hemingway. “He who dies on Thursday is quit for Friday.” If the novel is indeed on the way out, Norman Mailer won’t have to watch the final streaks of its particular dusk. R.I.P.
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