Norman Mailer | The New York Observer

The Lion in Winter: Five Snapshots

Tue, 13 Nov 2007 12:55:08 -0500

1. St. Michael’s Academy, North Ayrshire, Scotland, 1983

My English teacher, Mr. Campbell, said he’d never read anything by Norman Mailer. Mr. Campbell felt the world was filled with quite enough decadence and horror, arguing that we 15-year-olds should better place our faith in the works of Robert Burns and what he called “the emotional poets.” But I was on to my third reading of The Armies of the Night by then,...

Norman Mailer, 84, Is Dead

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 11:15:01 -0500

Two-time Pulitzer-Prize winning author Norman Mailer is dead at 84. He died early this morning at Mount Sinai Hospital of acute renal failure, his family told The New York Times. The prolific writer behind The Naked and the Dead, Armies of the Night, and Executioner's Song had a long and storied career, founding the Village Voice and constantly remaining at the center of American letters.

Charles McGrath writes:

He was also...

Report: Norman Mailer in Critical Care at Mount Sinai, Recovering From Surgery (UPDATE)

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 12:12:23 -0400

Norman Mailer was checked into Mount Sinai Hospital’s critical care unit yesterday with severe respiratory problems, The Post reported this morning. His ex-wife Carol Mailer told The Post that Mr. Mailer’s lung collapsed, and that although surgeons successfully removed the scar tissue, the 84-year-old writer is "not in very good shape."

Although an in-law told The Post that "everything's fine" and that "he's recovering," his children are reportedly "holding...

Satan, Meet Norman

Sun, 21 Jan 2007 19:00:00 -0500

The Castle in the Forest, by Norman Mailer. Random House, 477 pages, $27.95. Norman Mailer’s first novel in over 10 years has a couple of big surprises right off the bat. One is physical, the other spiritual. As to the first, the welterweight from Brooklyn turns 84 at the end of the month; you lift the cover wondering how many rounds he can still go with a pencil. Forget about it. This work has...

Mailer Was the Rage

Sun, 21 Jan 2007 19:00:00 -0500

I’m beginning to feel that Norman Mailer might have made a strategic mistake in recent interviews plugging his new book on writing, The Spooky Art. A strategic mistake in conspicuously low-balling his life’s work, his achievements as opposed to his once-grand expectations of himself. He told The Times, for instance, “I may last or I may not last … part of the ability to keep writing over the years comes down to living with...

Kipnis and Perel: A Literary Submission

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 19:00:00 -0500

Paul Holdengräber, resplendent in a cream-colored suit beneath the spotlights at the South Court Auditorium of the New York Public Library, was caught last Saturday afternoon between an attractive female therapist on his left and an attractive female scourge of therapeutic culture on his right. He did not seem to regret his predicament. “I have the distinct pleasure … ,” he began in his droll, circumlocutory, Austrian-sounding speech. “I think today is a good...

Never Mind the Bollocks--Here Is Walt and Mearsheimer!

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 10:59:46 -0400

Tonight's the big debate. I haven't been so excited since Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer and Susan Sontag squared off over feminism. As a pipsqueak, I was on the wrong side then (Mailer's), now I'm on the right one. One cool thing about this event is you can play the West End in London or the Arena Stage in Washington forever, but nothing really matters till you come to New York. That's the function...

Hugh McCracken, Ace Ombudsman

Sun, 18 Sep 2005 20:00:00 -0400

Like usual, I been a-eyein’ them newspapers and them TV news programs, and I’m a-here to tell ye I do not like what I been seein’. Let’s start at The New York Times for this here column. How’s that suit ye?

Little lady name of Curtis Sittenfeld had a Op-Ed article t’other day. Who is Miss Sittenfeld? She’s a lady scribbler who done wrote a book about the dirty business the young ’uns’ll get theyselves...

Hugh McCracken, Ace Ombudsman

Sun, 18 Sep 2005 20:00:00 -0400

Like usual, I been a-eyein’ them newspapers and them TV news programs, and I’m a-here to tell ye I do not like what I been seein’. Let’s start at The New York Times for this here column. How’s that suit ye? Little lady name of Curtis Sittenfeld had a Op-Ed article t’other day. Who is Miss Sittenfeld? She’s a lady scribbler who done wrote a book about the dirty business the young ’uns’ll get...

New York Is Reborn

Sun, 19 Dec 2004 19:00:00 -0500

Is New York over?

Well, that New York is. The 1920's crushed into the 1930's, and the 1990's crumbled into … this. The New York that was drunk on its own identity--the New York of Friends, Seinfeld and Sex and the City--was marketed to a nation that became so besotted with it that it trampled here and ate us alive. Right up to the Republican National Convention, with the astonishing picture of Barbara and Jenna...

Countdown to Bliss

Sun, 21 Dec 2003 19:00:00 -0500

Sasha Lazard and Michael Mailer

Met: March 2000| Engaged: April 12, 2003 Projected Wedding Date: Summer 2004 Michael Mailer, a Hollywood film producer ( Harvard Man, Black and White and the forthcoming Loverboy , starring Kevin Bacon), is engaged to marry Sasha Lazard, a classically trained singer who calls her latest album, The Myth of Red , a mix of "electronic music, opera and Russian folk songs." Mr. Mailer, 39, is the fifth child of Norman...

One Generation, Two Stories: On Campus and In Country

Sun, 28 Sep 2003 20:00:00 -0400

They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace, Vietnam and America, October 1967, by David Maraniss. Simon and Schuster, 572 pages, $29.95.

Toward the climax of The Armies of the Night , Norman Mailer delivers one of his finest bolts of lightning-like illumination, his intuition of the immense psychological distance between the demonstrators and the soldiers facing off outside the Pentagon that day in late October 1967. The formerly well-behaved SAT-taking children of the urban middle...

Pataki's Job Program: $220,000 for a Pal

Sun, 08 Jun 2003 20:00:00 -0400

What is George Pataki thinking? At a time when many New Yorkers are feeling an acute economic pinch, and with his own approval rating at its lowest level-37 percent-since he took office, the Governor is engaging in some unsavory cronyism which is both bad politics and terrible public relations. It's one thing for the Governor to weather the blame, deserved or not, for the state's dire financial condition-that comes with the job. But it's...

Mailer Was the Rage

Sun, 09 Feb 2003 19:00:00 -0500

I'm beginning to feel that Norman Mailer might have made a strategic mistake in recent interviews plugging his new book on writing, The Spooky Art . A strategic mistake in conspicuously low-balling his life's work, his achievements as opposed to his once-grand expectations of himself.

He told The Times , for instance, "I may last or I may not last … part of the ability to keep writing over the years comes down to living...

Ernie Anastos: 'Channel 2 Is Good' … Norman Mailer Does Street Time

Sun, 21 Jan 2001 19:00:00 -0500

Wednesday, Jan. 17

Ernie Anastos is a TV news anchor. This is hard to miss. Just take a look at the guy! Mr. Anastos has perfect hair and perfect teeth. He wears fine suits, fine shirts and silver cufflinks the size of Volkswagens. He has a firm handshake, a confident gait and a silky but authoritative voice. It's the kind of voice you want to hear when you turn on the TV to find out...

Norman Mailer to CBS: You Blew It! … 'I Feel Lucky,' Says Kimes' Hostage

Sun, 26 Nov 2000 19:00:00 -0500

It's another American Tragedy. Sort of.

Norman Mailer-the famous novelist, journalist, egotist and occasional pugilist-is miffed about the way CBS advertised the recent O.J. Simpson mini-series, American Tragedy, for which Mr. Mailer wrote the teleplay. "I found the advertising for it repugnant," said Mr. Mailer in a recent telephone interview from his home in Provincetown, Mass. Mr. Mailer said he thought CBS's marketing campaign for the two-part mini-series was overly sensational, placing too much attention...

Dick Cavett Moonwalks From Past With Rocky Horror Broadway Gig

Sun, 22 Oct 2000 20:00:00 -0400

Dick Cavett, slave to the moonwalk, just couldn't help himself. It was just past 1 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 12, and Mr. Cavett was sitting on a folding metal chair in the downstairs lobby of the Circle in the Square Theatre with a television camera trained on his face. He was finishing an interview with a small television film crew during a break from rehearsals. Mr. Cavett went on about the nature of matter...

Updike's Gertrude and Claudius: It's His Valentine to Eve

Sun, 13 Feb 2000 19:00:00 -0500

You could think of them as the Holy Family of secular Western culture: Gertrude, Claudius, Childe Hamlet the Danish prince and Hamlet-the-Father, the Unholy Ghost. And one way to think about John Updike's daring–and playful–new novel is to compare it to another writer's attempt to novelize another Holy Family: Norman Mailer's The Gospel According to the Son , his retelling of the family romance of Mary, Joseph, the Holy Ghost and the little Jewish...

It's Tom Wolfe Versus the 'Three Stooges'

Sun, 06 Feb 2000 19:00:00 -0500

IN NOVEMBER 1998, John Updike oh so quietly killed A Man in Full .

It was a clean kill. Issued from Mr. Updike's New Yorker pulpit, the review of the big Tom Wolfe novel seemed mild, gentle and fair: " A Man in Full still amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form. Like a movie desperate to recoup its bankers' investment, the novel tries too hard to please us." Soon...

Stormin' Norman Mailer Says He's Soured on Giuliani … Mailer: A New Biography Captures This Vexing Creature

Sun, 05 Dec 1999 19:00:00 -0500

Stormin' Norman Mailer Says He's Soured on Giuliani

Stormin' Norman now walks with two canes. In any other 76-year-old, this might be taken as a sign of old age, testament to the ravages of arthritis; in Norman Mailer, it looks more like the spirit of willful contradiction. He was a Brooklyn Heights ornament, a cannonball of pure urbanism, twice candidate for mayor (in 1961 and in 1969); now he lives in Provincetown, Mass., a...

Sexy Life Story, Limply Told: Gore Vidal, Angel and Monster

Sun, 17 Oct 1999 20:00:00 -0400

Gore Vidal: A Biography , by Fred Kaplan. Doubleday, 850 pages, $35.

Ah, to have been Gore Vidal! The blond princeling in 1930's Washington, the postwar prodigy, boozing and cruising with Tennessee and Truman, Christopher Isherwood and Paul Bowles; the double-edged sexual swordsman, slaying youths and maidens with seigniorial hauteur; the heavyweight author, trading blows with Norman Mailer and Bill Buckley; the sage of Ravello, surveying the world from high atop his Amalfi cliff; and...

Andy Warhol's Brillo Box in Big Whitney Farce

Sun, 10 Oct 1999 20:00:00 -0400

About the not-so-eagerly awaited Part 2 of The American Century: Art & Culture 1900-2000 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, let it be said straightaway that it offers few surprises in the installations devoted to works of art-or, for that matter, works best described as sub-art or failed art-for anyone who has been in frequent attendance at the Whitney in recent years. All of the usual suspects have been assembled in what looks...

Tales of Serial Antipathy: New York Eggheads Play Rough

Sun, 14 Feb 1999 19:00:00 -0500

Ex-Friends: Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer , by Norman Podhoretz. Free Press, 244 pages, $25.

In all the trips I've made to the Strand bookstore, I don't think I've ever failed to find at least one copy of Norman Podhoretz's 1967 memoir, Making It , somewhere on a dusty shelf. I've considered several theories to explain its cut-rate ubiquity. Perhaps Random House, anticipating...

Problem With Monogamy? It's So Incredibly Dull

Sun, 31 May 1998 20:00:00 -0400

Speaking to an audience of suits and ties and quiet jewelry at the 92nd Street Y on May 11, Norman Mailer told a story about an encounter with Lillian Hellman 20 years ago.

"I once was at a party with my then-wife, it was at Frank Conroy's house in Brooklyn Heights. We were sitting around, at a given moment there were eight or 10 or 12 people there. Lillian had the most annoying habit...

Women Demand Pleasure, So Men Invent Stiff Pill

Sun, 03 May 1998 20:00:00 -0400

Viagra is the perfect American medicament. It raises the Dow Jones and the penis, too. If you were ever wondering whether the stock market was a metaphor for male potency, here's your answer.

According to a venerable old Wall Streeter of my acquaintance, young Wall Streeters are predicting it will lower the divorce rate. That's a major concern in the age of equitable distribution. If you can still fuck your wife, maybe you don't have...

Glowing, Then Gossipy Talk: An Oral Fix on Truman Capote

Sun, 14 Dec 1997 19:00:00 -0500

Truman Capote , by George Plimpton. Doubleday, 498 pages, $35.

We have here the happy convergence of a great subject and a great technique, stage-managed by a master of the genre. It's been 13 years since George Plimpton's last foray (with Jean Stein) into "oral biography" immortalized Edie Sedgwick. Though fascinating all along the periphery, Edie lacked compelling interest at dead center: You could never argue for the greatness of an anorexic aristocrat turned Warhol...

Literary Pups Snap Savagely At Top Dogs

Sun, 26 Oct 1997 19:00:00 -0500

It happened in this newspaper. Sven Birkerts and David Foster Wallace went after Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and John Updike. In the same issue (Oct. 13), Philip Weiss charged at David Halberstam and Tony Lukas. Little wolf, big wolf, old wolf, new wolf, the literary males are at it again. Puff, puff, snap, snap, yip, yip, every puppy dreams of being top dog. Yes-in time, the leader of the pack wearies, his...

Roth, Mailer, Bellow Running Out of Gas

Sun, 12 Oct 1997 20:00:00 -0400

There comes a moment-it is scored in the evolving grain of things-when the balance between a father and son draws up even, holds for an instant, and then begins its slow tipping in the new direction. I'm talking about power here. Not physical power, but proprietary, maybe psychological. That which, however defined, forms the archaic scaffolding of so many male encounters and exchanges.

The curious thing about this subtle but hugely consequential shift is how...