About book The Spooky Art: Thoughts On Writing (2004)
My review ran in the San Jose Mercury News on February 2, 2003:As a student, I once found myself part of a group trying to make conversation with a writer-in-residence, Bernard Malamud. The talk reached several dead ends before Malamud mentioned that he had been asked to submit nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Were there any American writers we thought worthy? ''Well,'' I said hesitantly, ''what about Norman Mailer?'' There were some groans and hisses from other students, but also a glimmer of assent from Malamud before someone spoke up to suggest, more presciently, Saul Bellow. This was a long time ago, when a Nobel for Mailer was not implausible. He had recently published one of his best novels, the savage ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' and he had won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction for ''Armies of the Night.'' With their examination of American values and attitudes in a time of crisis, these books had the kind of engagement with politics and society that the Nobel committee likes to honor. But Mailer's reputation would fall -- thanks in part to a silly book about Marilyn Monroe and the goofy anti-feminism of ''The Prisoner of Sex'' -- and rise -- with another Pulitzer for ''The Executioner's Song'' -- and fall again. Except for the reviewers who were paid to read it, I don't know anyone who made it through the thousand-plus pages of ''Ancient Evenings.'' Mailer turned 80 on Friday, and the shadows are gathering for his generation, the one that dominated American letters in the years immediately following World War II. Malamud, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Walker Percy,James Baldwin and Truman Capote are gone. Bellow and Arthur Miller are 87. William Styron has fallen silent, and J.D. Salinger hasn't been seen for years. Of the more visible survivors of Mailer's generation, Kurt Vonnegut published his last novel in 1997, though he has recently shown up in a TV commercial. And Gore Vidal is more intent on being a political gadfly than a literary figure. (Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor aside, this may have been the last generation of American writers that looks like a men's club.) ''I'm now eighty, but some people still regard me as a wild man,'' writes Mailer in his new book -- published to celebrate his own birthday. ''Even at my peak, that was only five to ten percent of my nature. The rest was work.'' Still, that ''five to ten percent'' looms large in our consciousness of Mailer. Perhaps no American writer since Walt Whitman has had a more assertive ego. ''Do I embarrass myself?'' Mailer has often seemed to be saying. ''Very well then, I embarrass myself.'' He has certainly done so, starting in 1960 with a brawl, fueled by drugs and drink, in which he stabbed his second wife. (She declined to press charges but got revenge by writing a tattling memoir of their marriage; he spent some time in a mental hospital.) He ran for mayor of New York City in 1969, on a platform that advocated statehood for the city, but the press never took his campaign seriously, especially when Mailer got drunk at a fundraiser and hurled obscenities at his audience. Cautionary tale There were numerous other scuffles and dust-ups -- ''One relief to getting older,'' he says, ''is that I no longer have to square my shoulders every time I go into a bar'' -- with the result that Mailer's life becomes a cautionary tale about the hazards of celebrity. He admits as much: ''After 'The Naked and the Dead,' I had assumed I would work on large, collective novels about American life, books that required venturing out to get experience, but my celebrity took away much of the necessary anonymity I needed personally for that.'' ''The Spooky Art'' is a pastiche of reprinted interviews, essays, articles and prefaces, along with some new material, focused more or less on the craft of writing and the life of the writer. As Mailer's introduction makes clear, it's not a how-to book (unless you're looking for a book on how to be Norman Mailer). The best parts of it are Mailer's observations on writers like Tolstoy, D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, and a wonderful appreciation of ''Huckleberry Finn.'' But though the voice of the pugnacious Mailer in his prime is heard throughout the book, the cumulative effect is of a man who sees his career drawing to its close and who is haunted by his failure to engage the culture. In February last year, he told a group that he hadn't yet read Jonathan Franzen's ''The Corrections,'' a book then being touted as one of those ''large, collective novels about American life'' that Mailer in his youth had aspired to spend his career writing. Mailer had looked at the blurbs for the book and noticed that of the writers quoted in praise of it, ''most of them were of Franzen's generation. Updike wasn't there; not Bellow, not Roth; I wasn't there. . . . Apparently, 'The Corrections' is the book of a generation that wants to wipe the slate clean and offer a new literary movement. I think the younger writers are sick of Roth, Bellow, Updike, and myself the way we were sick of Hemingway and Faulkner.'' 'Corrections' critique Now he adds an update: He has read ''The Corrections,'' and maybe it's just as well Franzen didn't ask him for a blurb. The book, he observes, ''is too full of language, even as the nouveaux riches are too full of money. . . . Franzen is an intellectual dredging machine. . . . He may well have the highest IQ of any American novelist writing today, but unhappily, he rewards us with more work than exhilaration, since rare is any page in 'The Corrections' that could not be five to ten lines shorter.'' And he concludes, ''Bellow and Company can still rest on their old laurels, I think I am almost ready to say, 'Alas!' '' ''Literature,'' Mailer asserts elsewhere in the book, ''has been ground down in the second half of the twentieth century.'' Just as Shakespeare forged the consciousness of England, Joyce and Yeats created an identity for Ireland and Faulkner enabled us to imagine the South. ''If you ask who has had that kind of influence today in America, I'd say Madonna.'' The serious novel has failed to explain America to itself, Mailer laments, and in its place the job has been done by popular culture, the mass media, journalism and ''the worst of organized religion.'' As Louis Menand observed in an essay reprinted in his recent collection, ''American Studies,'' Mailer has remained in some ways trapped in the 1950s, a period that Mailer characterizes as ''that huge collective cowardice which was the aftermath of the Second World War.'' Now, at the beginning of a new century, Mailer scents the apocalypse as strongly as any fundamentalist awaiting the Rapture, and he's determined to preach at us -- a most American impulse for a writer, since our literature has its roots in the sermons of the Puritan fathers and the evangelicals of the Great Awakening: ''Nothing less than a fresh vision of the ongoing and conceivably climactic war between God and the Devil can slake our moral thirst now that we have passed through the incomprehensibilities of the last century.'' It's possible that Mailer's pessimism about literature, his despair that its role has been assumed by what he regards as lesser media, stems from a regret that he let himself become fodder for the media, damaging his ability to advance his art. In the final paragraphs of the book he shakes himself out of a ''prodigiously gloomy'' assessment of the state of literature, and squints at the horizon in search of hope. He has assembled this book, he tells us, out of the expectation that ''novelists will continue to appear, will write better and better, and may yet . . . give life to our beleaguered earth, our would-be great society dwelling still in the bonds of misperception.'' There's something admirable, even endearing, about Mailer in full harangue, sounding like he's delivering the Nobel Prize speech he has never been invited to give. It's a voice we don't hear from the current generation of writers, steeped as they are in postmodern ironies. And that realization should inspire in us a sense of loss.
I enjoyed this quite a bit -- much more than I've enjoyed most of Mailer's fiction, honestly.Mr. Mailer's career arc is fairly unique in that he became a nationally famous author at a young age -- and for a book that, by his own admission, was amateurish in parts. Still, The Naked and the Dead was a novel that the country needed at the time, and Mailer was lucky/talented enough to take advantage.Of course, delivering a follow-up without the benefit of sure-to-interest material was another animal entirely. Mailer's account of this struggle, as recounted in The Spooky Art, is frank, self-aware, and admirable in its probity.Spooky Art meanders a bit through the second hundred pages but reading everything isn't necessary. There are enough nuggets here that a reward is never far off.One thing I found to be particularly interesting was Mailer's approach to plot -- namely that he doesn't start with a concrete idea of an ending -- he lets 'the characters decide' their fates. He says something along the lines of: 'having an ending in mind from the start is constricting and leads to false actions for characters who, unlike real people, are then trying to reach a pre-determined end that's been mapped out for them.'Contrast that with John Irving, who I recently heard speak , and who writes his endings first. I recall him openly musing about how doing otherwise would even be possible, along the lines of: "how can one foreshadow if one doesn't know what's going to happen?" The moral of the story: there's really no 'right' way to write. Ya just gotta figure out what works for you.
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I've never read any of Norman Mailer's fiction; my basic knowledge of Mailer has been as a literary presence. A fan of Mailer's writing might have an entirely different take on this book, since (in part) he discusses various difficulties he encountered while writing his various books. Dince I write non-fiction, I wasn't exactly sure what Norman Mailer had to teach me. But I discovered that although writing fiction and non-fiction seem to be entirely different processes, yet as both are creative processes, they both come from the same place. I find Mailer's description of writing as "The Spooky Art" to be especially apt; I've often come across a passage I've written some time ago, not recognized it as my own, and simply recognized it as good writing. It's like having an alternate personality, one that needs to be nursed, trained, encouraged, and challenged. Developing this understanding and learning to harness the subconscious mind is where Mailer's book excels. It's not about the techniques of writing per se, but instead about the techniques of being a writer, which is far more valuable. The rest is just process.
—Kristofer Carlson
Mailer’s insight to the spookiness of the “work” of writing is, at times, meandering and kooky, but ultimately hits home on some major points. Avoiding his digressions on films and other topics, this book was extremely helpful in making me feel comfortable about taking risks with my writing in order to tell the best story possible. The book seems to offer more insight than advice, but it definitely touched upon many of the aspects of writing that are difficult to explain to those outside of the literary life.
—Joseph
I'm normally not a fan of greatest-hits aphorisms patched together to provide a new revenue stream for its author. But it's a pretty good quilt! The first part will be more near and dear for everyone -- basically Mailer's thoughts on writing arranged according to theme. Argue with it, sure, but you won't be bored. Less adroitly stitched together is the second half, in which Mailer is allowed to grab the mic to pontificate on less intriguing corollary topics (Film, The Occult, Television) in more long-winded ways.
—Robert
