Books, Arts & Manners

The Executioner’s Song By Norman Mailer Little, Brown, 1,056 pp., $16.95 Do not be misled by the fanfaronnerie of Norman Mailer, who is the most style-conscious, the most literary, of living novelists. Storytelling, he perceives, is a performance; a “style” defines a storyteller’s role; the use of precursors is that they have perfected roles you can learn to assume.

So for The Naked and the Dead he played Hemingway, for The Deer Park Scott Fitzgerald; for the “Aquarius” books, surprisingly, Henry Adams, as I’m indebted to a recent acquaintance for pointing out (it Was Adams who discovered the ironic uses of writing about oneself, bemusedly, in the third person). And for The Executioner’s Song he’s made a brilliant adaptation of that wayward forgotten master Sherwood Anderson, who contrived a prose in which to tell of lonely people doing things they have no way of thinking about.

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Hugh Kenner

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The Executioner’s Song By Norman Mailer Little, Brown, 1,056 pp., $16.95 Do not be misled by the fanfaronnerie of Norman Mailer, who is the most style-conscious, the most literary, of living novelists. Storytelling, he perceives, is a performance; a “style” defines a storyteller’s role; the use of precursors is that they have perfected roles you can learn to assume.

So for The Naked and the Dead he played Hemingway, for The Deer Park Scott Fitzgerald; for the “Aquarius” books, surprisingly, Henry Adams, as I’m indebted to a recent acquaintance for pointing out (it Was Adams who discovered the ironic uses of writing about oneself, bemusedly, in the third person). And for The Executioner’s Song he’s made a brilliant adaptation of that wayward forgotten master Sherwood Anderson, who contrived a prose in which to tell of lonely people doing things they have no way of thinking about.