Status Updates From Mind of an Outlaw: Selected...

I’m gonna call it on this one—for now at least. I’d say some 200 pages of Mailer essays about does it for me.

Moving to my On Pause shelf, a sort of purgatory or at least indefinite death row where it will have the company of many other big ol’ books that lost my attention or enthusiasm before getting in their last word.

Aw maaaan, Norman Mailer is mostly boring? I suppose the warning signs were there. There are of course great moments of insight and novelty that, parsed from a very large body of work, accumulate. This heap is hard won though and I’m afraid you have to bushwhack through dense reams of grandiosity and compensatory (I’m a writer but don’t forget I played rec football at Harvard!!!) masculinity for each grain.

Ch 6