Pieces and Pontifications

by Norman Mailer

Bound in the publisher's original cloth with the spine stamped in silver.

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

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

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

The "Pieces" section of this (it was split into two paperbacks later) is worthwhile if only for Mailer's awesome essay about street artists, "The Faith of Graffiti." But in addition to that is a fine essay about worthless television with the ridiculous title "A [something and something] Malignancy, Wicked and Bristling with Dots," (Am too lazy to look up the title), and a really fascinating essay about the mechanics of the Watergate break-ins that was clearly early research for Harlot's Ghost. It's a reminder that Mailer's mind, freed up from his grimmer, more-wrongheaded obsessions (see The Prisoner of Sex), is actually capable of awesome feats of consolidation and pattern recognition. He gets things, and puts them together in such a way that we get them, too.

[Carl Fanning · Rating 3 out of 5]

I much prefer Mailer the novelist over Mailer the pontificating philosopher.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Now read this one in my ongoing challenge to read all Mailer books. This one is another compilation of his work but the first half is some of his favourite essays from the Seventies and the second half is a load of interviews that he did over that period. As with all these kind of things I would say there are some brilliant bits, some okay parts and some really bad, dated and a bit crap parts.

This might seem a minor gripe but the version I had was so much two books that the page numbers started again in the second part which is kind of annoying and disorientating. Having read a lot of Mailer I have either read some of these essays before or they are so similar in the standard topics that he talks about that I might as well have done (God, Technology, Cancer, Henry Miller, feminism, the FBI, Watergate, Vietnam etc.) and it was hard to pick out the really good ones. On the other hand even though he didn't rate his interviews I thought these were much more interesting and newer than I remembered reading before (although again they cover a lot of the same topics).

There is a helpful part of the book where his biographer Michael Lennon breaks down Mailer's career at this point into three parts (his early success, where he inserts himself into national events, his biography phase) and it is interesting to see him develop over this period. He is bigging up his massive Egyptian book at this time (which became Ancient Evenings) and has had recent success with The Executioner's Song and I thought some of the most interesting parts were where he talked about his writing process, how and why he has different voices and focuses in different works, and how he became much more considered and philosophical (and maybe not quite as cocky and arrogant?) as he got older.

Anyway, as Mailer anthologies go this is quite a good one but I think not quite as good as Essential Errands and a bit more up and down and obviously not as comprehensive as some of the other later ones which are enormous. Arguably Mailer is also losing more of his relevance in the 1970s than the 1960s so perhaps that is another reason why this feels less important but actually I did quite enjoy the (slightly) less egotistical and more philosophical Mailer that seems to emerge by the end of the 1970s.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

The essays on Last Tango in Paris and "The Faith of Graffiti," as well as the interview on science and art, are just brilliant. The rest are merely terrific.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

The pieces kill it, particularly his writing on Narcissism. A fascinating look into a culture of writing that now belongs to the PAGES of history.