THE TIME OF OUR TIME
By Norman Mailer
Random House, 1,286 pages, $39.50
Of course this is a mess: What were you expecting? Norman Mailer, perhaps our most obsessively self-referential writer, rereads half a century of his sometimes great but usually uneven work and delivers a monster. “The Time of Our Time” includes excerpts from works of fiction and non-fiction that even Mailer’s trusted editor considers suspect, presents them in a wobbly thematic structure rather than a chronological one, and then gives up on that organization in the final 100 pages before slumping to a close. With a book this size, intended to substantiate Mailer’s frequent claims that he is the chronicler of our time, it’s no surprise that he titles the collection so triumphantly (with fireworks celebrating himself on the cover photo). It’s enough to make you wonder whether he wants you to applaud him or if he simply wants to beat you into submission. Then, as you read this doorstop of a book, you realize that the two are the same for Mailer.
Indeed, for Mailer, every piece of writing is a test of his manhood. The frequent sex scenes excerpted here are invariably unpleasant, because the male protagonist (either Mailer or a transparent stand-in) is too focused on maintaining power and control to achieve the “apocalyptic” coupling he so often imagines. “The Time of Our Time” chronicles one unnecessary fight after another–between lovers in his fiction, between writers in his nonfiction. It includes the transcript of a whining match (on Dick Cavett’s show) with fellow second-tier talent Gore Vidal, and a review of “American Psycho” so arcane and puffy it’s hard to tell what he thinks of Brett Easton Ellis’ book because the overextended language gets in his way. Rarely in this book and his career does Mailer deploy a simple declarative sentence when a lengthy convoluted one can carry the same information. The much-cited “The White Negro,” from 1959’s “Advertisements for Myself,” hasn’t aged well: Its overstated, insular, highbrow style reads as unhip as anything Mailer attacks in the essay.
Mailer, who asserts that “The Time of Our Time” is his way of organizing the past 50 years of American life, already attempted the same with his 1991 novel “Harlot’s Ghost,” which viewed “our time” through the prism of the CIA. So Mailer tries it again, inserting 12 excerpts from “Harlot’s Ghost” throughout the new collection in an attempt to rebuild the same structure. But it doesn’t work, because the abrupt shifts–fiction to non-fiction, reporting to fancy, analysis to prurience–make it impossible to keep up with any explicit narrative, let alone the implicit one here.
So why do we pay attention to Mailer in spite of all this? Because he has, several times in his career, written astonishingly well. When you read “The Naked and the Dead” (1948), “The Executioner’s Song” (1979) and the Russian half of “Oswald’s Tale” (1995), you thrill to the tight, tough prose and say, Yes, this guy can be as great as he keeps telling us he is. Then, in this collection, an excerpt from one of those books ends and you read something paunchy and wobbly from “The Deer Park,” “Ancient Evenings,” “Tough Guys Don’t Dance” or “The Gospel According to the Son,” and you get so frustrated with the repeated, similar, insight-free rants and coy pseudonyms (Aquarius?) that you remember he has written for 50 years and has yet to invent a believable (forget likable) female character. Even when he writes about a living woman, like Madonna, the subject of a 1994 profile, he’s more interested in telling her what he thinks of her than expressing the experience of her to the reader. It’s all me, me, me. It’s enough to make you wonder if Mailer chooses to use the third person when he writes about himself because he gets pleasure from writing his own name.
Ambition is no crime in an artist; if you don’t want to be great, don’t bother being one. And throughout his career, Mailer has wanted to be the best and the biggest. “The Time of Our Time” is big, all right, but it’s mostly fat, and what little muscle there is here is so buried in and twisted by that fat that it’s impossible to reach. A well-chosen, much shorter Mailer retrospective could make the case for him as a spirited writer who sometimes scales the highest heights. This is not such a book.
