I’ve been traveling so I just saw this Roger Kimball piece tearing Mailer to shreds in his distinctly urbane way: “What grand superlatives will be dusted off and rolled out to commemorate the polyphiloprogenitive wife-stabber and booster of homicidal misfits?” It’s absolutely devastating, so much so that now I’m almost afraid to now admit liking The Executioner’s Song. Read the whole thing.

But the interesting thing here is that as stupendously awful as Mailer could be, we were lucky in that his self-parodic prose rendered his morality as a person and an artist evident for all to see. Reading Kimball’s piece, I couldn’t help but think about David Foster Wallace’s savaging of John Updike ten years ago — though it’s needlessly PC in places, it’s another monumental literary takedown that’s worth reading. Wallace called Mailer, Updike, Roth et al the “Great Male Narcissists” and I think it could be argued that most of the major male post-war writers (with a few significant exceptions like Bellow and Vonnegut) had a total disregard for a morality that extended beyond themselves.

But Roth is so humorous and entertaining, and Updike such a gifted prose stylist that people readily overlook the flawed moral content of their work, whereas Mailer’s public antics made him such an easy target. And yet, if following his death if there’s still little to no consensus that Mailer was cretinous artistically and personally, there certainly wont be any unvarnished assessment when Updike and Roth shuffle off this mortal coil. Now I’m not saying that Roth and Updike are anywhere near as bad a writers as Mailer could be, but given the impact they’ve had on our collective moral consciousness it seems kind of imperative we honestly assess the flawed morality of the Great Male Narcissists as much as their prodigious talent.