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Tough Guys Don't Dance (2002)

Tough Guys Don't Dance (2002)

Book Info

Author
Rating
3.47 of 5 Votes: 1
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ISBN
0375508740 (ISBN13: 9780375508745)
Language
English
Publisher
random house

About book Tough Guys Don't Dance (2002)

I'm a huge Norman Mailer fan. (As an aside, let me just divulge something here. I have no idea, really, why I have a huge affinity for certain writers that are notoriously misogynistic in nature: Phillip Roth, John Updike, Mailer, to name a few. I don't consider myself a misogynist. I'm actually pretty pro-feminist in my views. So why I like these particular authors, who spend a good portion of their time writing about their sexual exploits and/or odes to their penis is beyond me. Except to say that, perhaps, I envy them a bit in their ability to be honest about their masculinity. I actually consider myself pretty honest about my own masculinity, but there are even places I won't go in my writing. I'm not a prude. I guess I just think that there should be some limits and taboo subjects in my own writing. But I'm perfectly okay with reading writers who don't think that, apparently. I know, I'm a contradiction. Whatever.) That said, of all the Mailer books I have read, "Tough Guys Don't Dance" was my least favorite. I was really hoping to like it, too, because it pays homage to a kind of dark, gritty roman noir by great pulp writers (and fellow alleged misogynists) like Jim Thompson and Mickey Spillane. It has all the elements: an alcoholic anti-hero, a murder of the anti-hero's wife, morally questionable cops, a femme fatale. Something about it just rubbed me the wrong way. Granted, I read this years ago, when I was in a very different place in my life, so I have a feeling that my take on it now may be a lot different. I may re-read this again later, as I plan on doing with a lot of Mailer's fiction, as well as Roth's and Updike's, mainly to see how different my views on masculinity have changed, if at all, since I've gotten married. Marriage will do that to a guy. It may actually make tough guys dance...

The novel starts on the twenty-fourth morning after Tim Madden’s wife decided she wanted to fly the coop. Madden is hung over and has a new tattoo on his arm: the name of a woman from his past. The passenger seat of his Porsche is drenched in blood. Over the course of the next several days, Madden unravels the mysteries that he only thought began when he met the beautiful rich blond and her ugly husband in his favorite Provincetown watering hole.That’s right, the book is essentially a high-class pulp novel in the style of Mickey Spillane or Donald Westlake. Now, I love those kinds of books. I don’t aspire to the gunplay or liver damage, but isn’t it fun to spend a few hours in a completely different world? A place in which it’s not unusual to kiss The Dame Who Got Away or to walk into a room and smell evidence emanating from your gun that could put you back in the clink?I thought the book offered some important lessons in writing craft: http://www.greatwriterssteal.com/2014...

Do You like book Tough Guys Don't Dance (2002)?

okay, at this point i just flat-out love norman mailer, but his endings are really letting me down. his voice is so wild and burning and furious, so full of madness and spiritual and intellectual yearning, but then somehow his stories always devolve into just a bunch of people sitting around and baldly explaining the story to each other in the least interesting way conceivable. he makes a big show of being an anti-rationalist, but as far as stories go, he's a total realist; all this lip service to ghosts and god and the beyond goes out the window in favor of neatly tying things up like a b-grade detective story circa 1952. HERE'S HOW I KILLED THESE PEOPLE AND WHY; NOW WASN'T THAT ALL INCREDIBLY BORING? at this point i'm really starting to suspect that Ancient Evenings has gotta be the one! or maybe The Gospel According to the Son-- somewhere he's gotta be able to break through "reality" enough to allow the storyworld to form according to his actual beliefs... reading these books is like watching someone with wings NOT JUMP OFF A CLIFF over and over and over again... JUST JUMP OFF THE GODDAMN CLIFF, NORMAN MAILER!!! I WANNA SEE YOU FLY!!!!!either that, or i should just stick to his journalism... i love when he rants about plastic...
—Ben Loory

Lo peor que he leído hasta el momento de Mailer. Cómo un tipo capaz de parir Los Desnudos y los Muertos, o La Canción del Verdugo puede escribir esta novela, es algo que no dejo de preguntarme. Al principio promete. No sigue los cánones de la novela negra al milímetro. En vez de ceñirse a la trama, el tipo empieza a recrearse en idas de pinza del protagonista, dotándole de un trasfondo que es casi más interesante que el leitmotiv. Sin embargo, conforme avanza la novela, lo que cuenta el protagonista deja de ser interesante y el argumento principal empieza a verse como lo que es, algo que no se sostiene y es maniqueísta a más no poder (la trama está al nivel de un capítulo de Scooby Doo). Mucho mejor la primera mitad del libro que la segunda.Lo malo es que cogeré el próximo libro de Mailer con resquemor.
—Sergio

Tough Guys Don't Dance is set in Provincetown during the off-season, when the few natives become inverted and spend most of their time in dark bars. It begins as a pretty straightforward, albeit dark, mystery, but quickly turns surreal and nightmarish as you spend a week of hell with our victim/suspect/murderer(?), as he attempts to piece together just what happened on the night he blacked out drunk and woke up with a tattoo on his arm that reads "Laurel", vague recollections of arguing with his missing wife, blood in his car, and a severed head tucked neatly away in his marijuana patch. It only gets weirder from there as we meet bizarre characters (a man who dances on the top of roofs during lightning storms, a sheriff with an unhealthy love for guns and weed, and a gambling addict so obsessed with the New England Patriots that he will bet on them every time, even though the story is set in the early 1980's...bizarre indeed), well-timed twists, and a surprisingly deep look into the human psyche. It is at times a brutal look at life, and since this is a Normal Mailer book, there is plenty of depravity and detailed examinations of the darker side of man. All in all, a great read that rises above the typical mystery. Huzzah!
—Andrew

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