I have absolutely no idea why the Pulitzer committee thought this thing qualified for the prize for fiction. It reads like a rough draft, a bunch of only semi-connected notes. It felt like the author had just dumped a bunch of jumbled pieces of wadded up paper covered with scribbled comments -- the preliminary sketches a writer might do before getting down to actual work -- on a typist's desk and asked to have the mess transcribed into one long document. Did the committee fall for it because the events were so recent? Was it the force of Norman Mailer's personality? Or did they confuse quantity with quality? The book does run over 1,000 pages in the hardcover edition I tried to read.
In any case, the choppy, disjointed style, the stand alone paragraphs separated by wide swaths of white space (triple spacing between the paragraphs? Why, dear God, why?), the writing that seems to be targeted toward readers who are stuck at about a third grade level, . . . it's a mess. I know there has always been a tendency of critics to love literary works that are so bad the critics get suckered into thinking they're good*, but surely someone on the committee must have realized that Mailer put this mess together while so drunk he was doing good to remember how to spell his own name. Or maybe he was stoned. The '70s were, after all, when the literati discovered hippies and weed.
As for the book's subject matter, the narrative is a loosely constructed description of the last few years of Gary Gilmore's life. Gilmore gained national attention in the 1970s after being convicted of homicide. There was never any question about his guilt; Gilmore was a remarkably inept criminal. Gilmore himself requested the death penalty and asked that a firing squad carry out the sentence. When Mailer wrote the book he took a lot of heat for trying to make a psychotic jerk look good, but I'm thinking no one who actually read much of The Executioner's Song would come away with a positive image of Gilmore. It doesn't take very many pages in for a reader to pick up on the fact that Gilmore is totally self-centered, has no clue how to behave around anyone who isn't a fellow ex-con, and is so quick to anger that he's pretty scary.
I did feel a little sorry for the bastard -- somewhere along the line in his childhood he went off the rails -- but about the only positive thing I can say about Gilmore is that he had enough balls to decide enough was enough. He'd spent most of his adult life behind bars, had been thoroughly institutionalized and could not function as a normal human being outside a prison, and he knew it. He also knew he didn't want to spend the rest of his natural life as a guest of the state of Utah.
Given that I've deemed this book unreadable, I think it's obvious what my recommendation would be: avoid this sucker. Life is too short to waste it on bad books.
Next up on the list: A Confederacy of Dunces. No surprise. It's another one that's going to be an Interlibrary Loan Request.
*James Joyce supposedly once confessed that much of the idiosyncratic spellings and creative word choices that critics praised in his writing was actually the result of him being a terrible typist.
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