The Mailer Review/Volume 7, 2013/An Executioner for a New Age: Difference between revisions

{{Quote box|title=''[[The Executioner’s Song]]''|By [[Norman Mailer]]<br />Foreword by Dave Eggers<br />New York: Grand Central: 2012<br />1109 pp. Paper $18.99.|align=right|width=25%}}

In these heady days of the ever-more-powerful Google search, it might seem odd that anyone would re-release an oversized 1100-page behemoth of a novel like ''The Executioner’s Song''. Granted, this 2012 edition includes Mailer’s complete novel and afterword, a new foreword by Dave Eggers, several black-and-white photographs of Gilmore and some of the other important figures, and an appendix with snippets of Gilmore’s final letters, but for being such a weighty volume, it actually seems kind of light when compared to what Google can amass.

So why, I must ask, do we get another paper version of Norman Mailer’s 1979 Pulitzer-Prize winner on dead trees? Perhaps it’s due to the fact that ''ES'' might be Mailer’s magnum opus, Dostoyevskian in its scope, so the merits and importance of Mailer’s novel still resonate today. ''ES'' deserves our attention — particularly the “Americans” among us — so that we might gain some insight into the peaks and valleys of our humanity. In the wake of September 11, 2001, the interminable wars on drugs, poverty, and immigration, growing income inequality, the partisan and hyperbolic media landscape, gun violence at home, in movie theaters, and in schools, irrational clinging to 2nd Amendment rights, global climate change, and the subsequent atrocities committed in Iraq and Afghanistan by the US in the name of “freedom,” it seems America has embraced the song of the executioner, if not the tenor of Mailer’s novel. Eggers reminds us that with Gilmore’s execution, the US reinstated capital punishment and since 1977 executed over 1,000 more people in the name of justice (VIII). Echoing Eggers: we still seem to need Norman Mailer.

''The Executioner’s Song'' speaks loudly with Mailer’s voice — not like his other Pulitzer-Prize novel ''The Armies of the Night'' published over a decade before in which “Norman Mailer” plays a central role — but the voice of the American man of letters whose interests and ambitions could not be demarcated by anything as simple as genre or medium. ''ES'' tells the story of Americans in what might be their own language, especially the women in “Western Voices”: language that seems as simple as a landscape, but that on closer scrutiny contains contrasts, subtleties, and shadows.

Mailer’s new language, one that Eggers discusses in his foreword, sublimates the “Norman Mailer” that had come before. The prose seems to reflect the story and its participants, not the author’s personality, as the reading public had come to expect from Mailer’s writing. He’s more Raymond Carver than the “Norman Mailer” of the sixties. It’s as if, Mike Lennon writes in a letter to ''The New York Times'', Mailer tries to reinvent himself for a new generation — or at least a new America, post-Gilmore.

These are among the reasons that ''The Executioner’s Song'' continues to be relevant. A new edition of a classic is always welcome, and Eggers’ foreword emphasizes the importance of ''ES'' even to a generation who have likely never heard of Gary Mark Gilmore. He encourages a first reading with no foreknowledge of the events to get the most tension out of the narrative, suggesting that the foreword be returned to only after the novel has been read, if at all. New readers could get a pure experience, one that the original audience for ''ES'' could not have had, for even without a 24-hour news cycle, Gary Gilmore’s name was headline news for several months at the end of 1976 and the beginning of 1977. New readers would have no such context, isolated for the immediacy of the events, so they can experience them through the filter of Mailer’s narrative.