Maybe it’s a little early, but I’ve got to say it: I’m kind of regretting picking up The Executioner’s Song. I’ve got to wonder a bit, actually. The Kindle version I’m reading had an extensive introduction where I distinctly remember the writer telling me one of the masterful things about Mailer’s work was that he made Gary Gilmore seem likeable in the beginning of the book as he was setting up the background of the story.
Was this guy on another planet? I’m a couple hundred pages into it and even if I didn’t know the ending already, I would have Gilmore pegged as the scum he actually turned out to be. What was the guy thinking? “In part one, we find out Gary Gilmore was a violent, delusional, misogynistic and manipulative pedophile…but wait’ll you see how bad he really turned out to be in parts two and three!” Throw in the almost non-stop near pornographic references to sexual encounters, and you’ve got a winner: the inability to read a page without some (at times fairly graphic) reference to either sex, theft, or violence.
Maybe I should have read the guy’s arguments a little more critically before I committed to the book. Still, it was reviewed positively by Joan Didion, and that’s an endorsement I can hang with, even during these hard times.
I must say though, he was right in that it’s a fast read. I’m getting in at least 90 pages a day so far. And although the style is far too direct and blunt for me, it’s not too hard to keep moving (although it does get a touch monotonous in the constant drumbeat of aforementioned seediness). One could even think that its bluntness was a masterful reflection of the brutality of the overall story. We’ll see. As I’ve said — they don’t win Pulitzers for bad writing. Yet I’m almost afraid it did so well because of the subject matter rather than the art: the first man executed in the United States (and willingly so) after a moratorium on the death penalty during which I’m sure its pros and cons were argued mercilessly. Still, I’m not going to give up on it, and I think I’ll actually be able to finish it within a couple of weeks.
And who knows? If I had a quarter for every book that starts out slowly…