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{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">''The Mailer Review''/Volume 2, 2008/</span>A Dialogue on Mailer’s Novels}} | {{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">''The Mailer Review''/Volume 2, 2008/</span>A Dialogue on Mailer’s Novels}} | ||
{{MR02}} | {{MR02}} | ||
{{byline|last=Begiebing|first=Robert J.|last1=Bufithis|first1=Philip|abstract=Are Mailer’s novels visionary narratives that offer the boon of a new consciousness or do they present more sensation than substance? Is he a major philosophical novelist of our time or are his ideas often untenable? Mailer scholars Robert J. Begiebing and Philip Bufithis debate these and related questions.|url=https://prmlr.us/ | {{byline|last=Begiebing|first=Robert J.|last1=Bufithis|first1=Philip|abstract=Are Mailer’s novels visionary narratives that offer the boon of a new consciousness or do they present more sensation than substance? Is he a major philosophical novelist of our time or are his ideas often untenable? Mailer scholars Robert J. Begiebing and Philip Bufithis debate these and related questions.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr02dia}} | ||
{{dc|dc=M|ailer’s nonfiction has been honored with praises and prizes.}} One might sensibly argue that it contributed to a revolution in the consciousness of his time. But his fiction is still a matter of vigorous debate, and the Mailer Question persists. Simply put: How good are his novels? Two Mailer scholars having drinks and dinner two years ago in Provincetown discussed the Question. The night wore on, the restaurant closed, but their discussion continued in the months that followed and developed into this dialogue. It opens with two overview statements on Mailer the novelist, debates three novels, then assesses Mailer’s other novels starting with ''The Naked and the Dead''. | |||
'''Bufithis''': Norman Mailer’s career as a literary celebrity clouded his standing as an authentic artist. An accurate measure of that standing depends on how we judge his novels. Ranging from realistic to mythopoetic, they comprise an adventurous body of work. And Mailer is an impressive prose stylist. But how high is the evaluation we can finally apply to his novelistic achievement? Mailer himself sets the measure when he says, “For if I have one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoyevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read, for it would carry what they had to tell another part of the way.” | '''Bufithis''': Norman Mailer’s career as a literary celebrity clouded his standing as an authentic artist. An accurate measure of that standing depends on how we judge his novels. Ranging from realistic to mythopoetic, they comprise an adventurous body of work. And Mailer is an impressive prose stylist. But how high is the evaluation we can finally apply to his novelistic achievement? Mailer himself sets the measure when he says, “For if I have one ambition above all others, it is to write a novel which Dostoyevsky and Marx; Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read, for it would carry what they had to tell another part of the way.” | ||