Book Review: The Executioner's Song, by Norman Mailer

Reviewed by David Abrams

For the moment, let’s set aside the fact vs. fiction argument raging on either side of Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song and face up to one simple fact: this is one damned good book. Some folks have even called it a “masterpiece.” I’m not about to talk anyone out of the “M” word.

If you’re one of those who insists on arranging books according to fiction and non-fiction, then you’d better shelve Mailer’s “true-life novel” somewhere in the middle. Using a novelist’s technique of fabricated dialogue and compressed events, Mailer writes with such force and energy that it fully deserves its trophy-case of literary prizes, including the Pulitzer.

Mailer (who first burst onto the scene with The Naked and the Dead in 1948) has always rankled both critics and readers with his sprawling literature. Some readers lose patience with his wordy prose; some critics say he’s just plain bombastic. I say he’s just plain good.

By the time you make it to the end of The Executioner’s Song, you’ll either hate him or love him—Mailer does not allow any namby-pamby in-between. I’ve read The Executioner’s Song twice—the first time in 1981, two years after its publication and four years after Gary Mark Gilmore’s death by Utah firing squad; the second time was at the turn of our century. The interval of nearly two decades did little to dim my enthusiasm for this book (which I prefer to classify as “embellished journalism”).
 

Gary Gilmore (via)

 

When Gilmore was arrested, tried and convicted of killing two Mormon men in Provo, Utah, one hot July night in 1976, I was living about 500 miles away. Up in Wyoming, I followed the whole murder case on the evening news. Back then, the viciousness of Gilmore’s crime (shooting decent Americans in the head with little provocation) was big news. Our society had yet to see the likes of Jeffrey Dahmer, the Night Stalker, Columbine High School, or whatever sad shooting you’ll find in the headlines tomorrow. Gilmore, with his movie-star good looks and piercing gaze, was the Monster Next Door.

 

After his conviction, things really took a turn for the bizarre. Gilmore was given the death penalty.  Rather than fight with a series of appeals and pleas for gubernatorial pardons, Gilmore told the state he wanted to die. Never before had someone pursued his own death sentence. The media swooped in on the penitentiary and the rest of the world held its breath to see if Gilmore would eventually change his mind. He didn’t. And that’s partly what makes this book so fascinating: the character (if a real person can be called a “character”) of Gary Mark Gilmore. He is, in fact, so complex that even a tough-guy writer like Norman Mailer has difficulty getting inside his heart and head to find out what made the Monster Next Door tick.  (Unlike Truman Capote who burrowed deep—some say too deep—into his In Cold Blood killers.)

 

But Mailer gives it his best shot and the result is a big, whopping book composed of bite-sized vignettes—most of them only a paragraph long—making the pages fly past at the speed of cinema.  The book tracks the lives of Gilmore, his girlfriend Nicole, his Mormon relatives, his victims and the media circus that set up camp outside the state penitentiary. The Executioner’s Song is divided into two parts: "Western Voices" (the crimes and the trial) and "Eastern Voices" (the deathwatch and execution). Of the two, the first is much more fascinating and suspenseful—a result, probably, of our morbid fascination with all things bloody and twisted. Some of the second half is tedious, especially the long stretches with Lawrence Schiller, pseudo-journalist and self-promoter who is the only writer allowed to share Gilmore’s last moments (Mailer cut a deal with Schiller to use his notes and tape recordings for this book). Still, I was actually moved by Gilmore’s final walk toward the firing-squad chamber. By that point, he almost had my sympathy.

 

“The book is huge in both size and scope, but Mailer always finds the right words to describe even the smallest of events.”

 

The book is huge in both size and scope, but Mailer always finds the right words to describe even the smallest of events. Here, for instance, is the moment the entire book has been leading to—the execution by firing squad:

 

When it happened, Gary never raised a finger. Didn’t quiver at all. His left hand never moved, and then, after he was shot, his head went forward, but the strap held his head up, and then the right hand slowly rose in the air and slowly went down as if to say, “That did it, gentlemen.” Schiller thought the movement was as delicate as the fingers of a pianist raising his hand before he puts it down on the keys.

I have just one word for a passage like that: Wow.  Okay, maybe one other word:  Masterpiece.

Reviewer David Abrams is the author of Fobbit, a comedy about the Iraq War (Grove/Atlantic) that Publishers Weekly called “an instant classic.” His short stories have appeared in Esquire, Narrative, Salamander, Connecticut Review, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, The North Dakota Review, and other literary quarterlies. He earned a BA in English from the University of Oregon and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.He retired from active-duty after serving in the U.S. Army for 20 years, a career that took him to Alaska, Texas, Georgia, the Pentagon, and Iraq. He now lives in Butte, Montana, with his wife. His blog, The Quivering Pen, can be found at: www.davidabramsbooks.blogspot.com. (Author photo courtesy Lisa Wareham Photography.)

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