The best books to start reading Norman Mailer

Mailer’s novels from the 1960s-2007 are notoriously challenging, and I’ve seen readers wanting to see what Mailer is about sometimes make the mistake of starting with one of his more difficult, convoluted novels—Ancient Evenings or Harlot’s Ghost, for example. But The Executioner’s Song is thought by many critics to be not only his best novel (winning his second Pulitzer Prize), but his most readable, despite its length. It recounts the story and ultimate execution in January of 1977 of Gary Gilmore, who murdered two men during his release from prison on parole. But what Mailer does is work outward from that basic fact to go beyond the media circus that surrounded the case and the execution to try to understand Gilmore, his girlfriend Nicole, and the whole American setting—particularly the American West—that defined their lives. 

Joan Didion’s wonderful review in the NYTBR said Mailer had written a book that captured “the authentic Western voice rarely heard in literature,” and she was the first to recognize that “the strongest voices in it are those of the women.” Only Mailer, she said, would have dared it, taken the risk. “This is an absolutely astonishing book,” Didion concluded. All this was accomplished by Mailer’s use of a flat, readable rhetoric, rather than his torrential, Melvillian style.  

I’d argue that this is the greatest World War II novel by an American who was there. It’s another long book, but clearly written in an accessible early style Mailer learned from such literary heroes as John dos Passos and James T. Farrell. This debut novel made Mailer suddenly famous at age 25, “as if I were shot out of a cannon,” as he put it. Set on a Pacific Island near the end of the war, we learn the life stories of about ten men (enlisted and officers) as they struggle to survive and to win the battles they are forced to fight. It’s an unfailingly honest vision of actual combat and military occupation. As a veteran myself, I was impressed by Mailer’s understanding of such men (from privates to generals), of the absurdities of Army life, and of the follies of leaders whose ambitions rarely match their competence. Mailer’s often-explored theme of the enduring tendency of Americans to turn toward fascism began with his first published book and resonates for me, as it will for you, even today.

One of the best sports books ever written? Judge for yourself, but I think it is certainly among the best. Even if you don’t like boxing or martial arts, you’ll enjoy this eminently readable book about “the rumble in the jungle” in Zaire between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, two heroic athletes in conflict. Although there are moments of self-deprecating humor and Mailer’s usual philosophical concerns, Mailer focuses squarely on the two athletes, their training camps and trainers, the people around them, and the experience of being in Africa. And then of course there is the fight itself, described in vivid and inventive detail that I found is as riveting to other readers as it is to me. The philosophical/metaphysical concerns here are part and parcel of those Mailer developed through his sixty years as a writer, but they are introduced in an easily digestible style and seem to me to fold seamlessly into the African cultures he is discovering as he covers the fight.

Mailer published three nonfiction books near the end of his life to lay out his final take on issues he’d been pursuing his entire writing life and as a highly visible, often notorious, public intellectual: On God, Why Are We at War?—echoing his 1967 novel Why Are We in Vietnam?—and The Big Empty. I chose The Big Empty because the reader comes to understand where Mailer lands finally on so many issues he covered during his decades of political and societal journalism, with a special focus on democracy in America, its potential and its abiding threats.

The book is structured as a series of dialogues with his youngest son, John Buffalo Mailer, who in his introduction argues that such a dialogue with his father represents a necessary conversation among generations. Their topics include, among other pressing intergenerational concerns, the American presidency, endless war, American 21st-century politics, American fascism, the environment, false patriotism, political correctness, the welfare of the rich, boxing, and existentialism. To my mind, the dialogues read like a primer on what we were and are in for in the second and third decades of this century. The dialogues are prescient and act, to me at least, as little epiphanies about our parlous circumstances and possible, if difficult, directions forward.

Published on the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Naked and the Dead, the book is an overview of Mailer’s entire writing career up to 1998, by way of introductions to and excepts from his decades of fiction and nonfiction. I make this recommendation as a risk because the book is a nearly 1300-page-long anthology. No one is going to sit down and read cover to cover, however, so I offer it as a way of seeing the sweep of a major author’s career; here you can dip in and out as you wish to see what’s up with a given work or topic at any point in Mailer’s publishing life, up to 1998. You can decide then what you want to read in the offered excerpt or in full, either from an included short work of magazine journalism or a short story, or from a whole book, should you choose to get hold of the excerpted book. Topics range from American political journalism to pop culture (Marilyn Monroe and Madonna, for instance), the cold war, Hollywood, espionage, President Kennedy, conservatism and liberalism, presidential primaries, the moon landing, women’s liberation, Watergate, and book reviews of contemporary writers. And more. My personal favorite, presented in full from The New Republic in 1992, is “By Heaven Inspired,” a rollicking take on the Republican convention in Houston that year. When I read some of this piece to graduate students in a writing workshop as an exercise in voice, they were blown away. You will be too.