This review by Terry Teachout of The Time of Our Time appeared in the June 22, 1998, issue of National Review.
Why is Norman Mailer still famous? He hasn’t written a good book since The Executioner’s Song, which is 19 years old. Except for The Naked and the Dead, none of his novels continues to be read, and his magazine journalism long ago curdled into self-parody. I’ve never met anyone under the age of forty who took him seriously. Yet Random House, which so far as I know is not a charitable institution, is celebrating his 75th birthday by bringing out a 1,200-page anthology of his writing, chosen by the master himself. That’s a pretty fancy birthday present, especially given the fact that it will surely wind up on the remainder tables by year’s end.
Mailer has been writing badly for so long that it is easy to forget that a great many intelligent people once took him almost as seriously as he took himself. (Trivia question: Who called him “one of the few postwar American writers in whom it is possible to detect the presence of qualities that powerfully suggest a major novelist in the making”? Answer: Norman Podhoretz, writing in 1959.) And The Time of Our Time contains ample proof that for all his faults, the young Mailer really did have talent to burn. He could blather on for page after page about existential anguish, then snap into focus and toss off the kind of brilliantly exact description that made his colleagues sweat with envy. Here is Truman Capote, pinned down in one perfect sentence: “‘I didn’t want to do this show,’ he said in a dry little voice that seemed to issue from an unmoistened reed in his nostril.”
The trouble with Mailer was that he was drunk on ideas, a deadly tipple for woolly-minded pseudo-intellectuals. Sensing instinctively that liberalism had run its course, he made the mistake of assuming that radicalism was the only way out, and complicated matters still further by opting for a romantic radicalism rooted in sexual mysticism. As a result, his style grew bloated and slack, especially on the increasingly frequent occasions when he grappled with imperfectly digested philosophical concepts:
It is on this bleak scene that a phenomenon has appeared: the American existentialist — the hipster, the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled (at what damage to the mind and the heart and the liver and the nerves no research foundation for cancer will discover in a hurry), if the fate of twentieth-century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.
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