The Time of our Time

by Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer's The Time of our Time is a giant retrospective, a rich, boisterous portrait of our times seen through the fiction and reportage of one of America's greatest writers.

Mailer selected and edited the contents of this work to create an ongoing narrative of events large and small that have shaped America over the last fifty years. Included are passages from The Naked and the Dead, The Deer Park, An American Dream, The Armies of the Night, The Executioner's Song, Ancient Evenings, and Harlot's Ghost as well as portraits of Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Lee Harvey Oswald, Madonna, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and Richard Nixon as they appeared in some of his best magazine pieces.

How readable is the result! It is as if one is being drawn into a fabulous novel with extraordinary characters, real and fictional, who appear and reappear through the years until a vast mural of America as a nation comes into focus, full of follies and blunders, surprisingly elegant and often crazy-tragic in its losses and large in its triumphs.

On display here are Mailer's enormous energies, his vast curiosity, and his powers of delineation. Here too are his errors of judgment and deed, both personal and literary. As a writer, Mailer eschews all limits. He goes at the world like a tiger. What will surprise many readers of The Time of our Time is what a shrewd and stylish tiger he has been.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Memoir

1328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Norman Kingsley Mailer was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and film director.

Along with Truman Capote, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe, Mailer is considered an innovator of creative nonfiction, a genre sometimes called New Journalism, but which covers the essay to the nonfiction novel. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award once. In 1955, Mailer, together with Ed Fancher and Dan Wolf, first published The Village Voice, which began as an arts- and politics-oriented weekly newspaper initially distributed in Greenwich Village. In 2005, he won the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from The National Book Foundation.

Reviews

[Elena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Con el libro de un autor favorito como es Norman Mailer (1923-2007) acabo, por el momento pero no sé si por mucho tiempo, mi itinerario por las letras norteamericanas. "América" o "The Time of Our Time", en su título original, traza una historia social y cultural de los Estados Unidos contemporáneos. Mailer reúne una serie de artículos, ensayos, reportajes y reflexiones, algunos aparecidos en la prensa de la época pero que, según se cuenta en el prólogo, no son los mejores, sino los que siguen un discurso que forma un cuerpo histórico desde 1960 a 1998, desde la elección de Kennedy hasta las desventuras de Clinton, pasando por Nixon y el Watergate. Mailer cortó y ordenó estos artículos con la intención de formar una obra lo más breve posible sin notas al pie. El resultado es un libro radical y salvaje que se lee con la fluidez de la mejor novela fruto del dilatado trabajo de un testigo privilegiado.

[Jeremy Raper · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a collection of excerpts from Mailer's novels, essays, articles, etc, to celebrate his 50yrs of publishing; it's what first gave me a taste of Mailer and his inimitable style. Highly recommend to those looking to ease their way into his ouvre. Be warned - it's a bit of a brick (1300 pages or so).

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read a lot of Mailer books (trying to read and own them all) having tied myself to the mast of his writing in my late teens when I read The Naked and The Dead and absolutely loved it. Now that I have read most of the books I got this one to push towards getting all of them, which is basically a compilation of lots of his existing novels, poems, articles and reporting. I wasn't sure whether I wanted this or not really, it is mostly books I have already read, with a few interesting/useful additions (the Gore Vidal headbutt, interviewing Madonna, reviewing American Psycho) so isn't it really just going over the same ground?

First of all, it is absolutely massive, at over 1,200 pages so I am not really that sure who it is for unless it is people like me (of which there can't be that many). Interestingly, rather than just pick his best writing this is compiled largely in chronological order in terms of when the pieces of writing were set (rather than when they were written) except the book about Ancient Egypt and the one about Jesus which are included at the end, presumably because Mailer wanted to include them but couldn't really justify them being anywhere else. As a result, a lot of the best stuff is early on in the anthology, with Mailer dissecting the 1960's, Vietnam, the Cold War, Kennedy/LBJ/Nixon in his own inimitable style. Unfortunately as he gets older there are more misses alongside the hits, with ill-judged attacks on the women's liberation movement, gay rights, modern architecture (yawn), and his long-standing weird association of cancer with everything plastic and modern.

As might be expected it is all crazily uneven with great bits of writing interspersed with bad and sometimes quite embarrassing views and perspectives. Even when sometimes you wish he would Mailer never backs down, exploring, arguing and analyzing such a wide range of topics in such a diversity of styles that I did come back to my original perspective that he really was such an amazing writer that I wish more people still did read. It probably would have annoyed him that his journalism is often better than his novels, and the novels that are closest to non-fiction are often the more successful, but as a way in to understanding post-war America this work is probably more interesting and enjoyable than a lot of history books that you might read on that topic.

Overall then, having had my reservations, I did end up really liking this book as it reminded me why I like Norman Mailer so much even with all his faults (of which there are many). If you are interested in him as well then I would not recommend anyone start here however. The Fight is probably the easiest one to start with alongside the ones about the March on Vietnam, the presidential primaries of the 1960's and the moon landings, then if you want to commit to the bigger books then The Naked and the Dead, The Executioner's Song and Harlot's Ghost are great 'big' novels in my opinion as a Mailer obsessive.

[Mike Davis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some brilliance, some dross, some confusion. Mailer can write superbly, but he needed a firm editor, which I am sure he would have resisted. A great book to work steadily through for 6 months.

[MingoBJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Falta algo de contexto sobre todas aquellas campañas políticas descritas, pero es muy interesante.

[David Kuhn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pick this tome up. Read stories here and there. Leave some behind. But read on, and see how shameful it is that Mailer has fallen out of fashion. Here is the man who novelized fact, who brought you close to the soul of the subject, the matter, enlarging what was once two-dimensional; and he did it before anyone else in the post-war era. To take perhaps his most famous example, read Superman Comes to the Supermarket. And see how Mailer was not only prescient, for capturing how politics was becoming entertainment. I defy you to read any better political writing then when he begins to write about the “elusive detachment” of JFK and compares him to LBJ. And yet Mailer underestimated JFK. But FDR was underestimated by the pundits of his day. Novelists don’t need to be the most accurate pundits (hell, sadly, even pundits don’t need to be accurate). Novelists just need to be true, in the deeper sense. I think Mailer’s best writing, by far, was his non-fiction work. And yet it was so great because he was a novelist first and a reporter second.

[Steve Mayer · Rating 3 out of 5]

How does one review 1300 pages of excerpts from Norman Mailer's works? Needless to say, it's something of a mixed bag, and you couldn't read it at less than half a dozen sittings (took me almost a year, on and off). But there is much here of interest, particular for those who can never tire of reading about the Sixties. It was fun to read the middle third after Robert Caro, to get quite a different, and contemporaneous perspective on some of the same events. Best of all was the chance to discover some of Mailer's works that I hadn't looked at before--Harlot's Ghost, in particular, and The Executioner's Song. One curious omission is Mailer's brilliant essay on Watergate, A Harlot High and Low. And Mailer is brave enough to include some of his worst moments, most notably, his account of a drunken speech he gave the night before the March on the Pentagon in The Armies of the Night.

[Kirby Gann · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is really what the title suggests it is: the history of the nation's time from WWII to, oh, I dunno, sometime near the millennium. Mailer's record as a novelist is spotty at best, but much of this collection is represented by his journalism, which I think was his strongest talent. The man was annoying, clownish, most likely insane at different periods in his life, and I think that from a younger man's perspective that he was often very, very funny without meaning to be. (I.e., it's often difficult to take him seriously.) But in reading this book I felt like I had a more intimate understanding of the fifties, sixties, and seventies than I've ever learned from conventional history books.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Massive compilation of a tormented and tormenting writer who, it must be admitted, was capable of justifying his own bullshit theatrics with brilliance.

Not everything herein is good, but much is worthwhile a few times over. I've learned a lot about America from Mailer, and though I think his influence has begun to pass me by personally, he's challenged me as a reader and a potential writer myself.

He's daring and always interesting, since he'll pretty much manically surge from one concept and genre to another....usually hitting at least something which is going to stop you dead in your tracks!

[robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's lots of sentimental tripe (such as the brotherhood through boxing with Ryan O'Neal episode), but I am frequently astonished by the brilliance of what I've encountered herein. However, I've been reading a lot of Mailer lately and am not going to read 1300 more pages. Perhaps it may someday stand as the signal achievement of a great writer. Alas, I do not have the patience to pass a verdict on this tome.

[Matthew Matheson]

1998

[Cullen · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting compilation using extracts from his novels..... I'd recommend reading the originals instead.