Mailer: A Biography

When a biography opens with an account of its subject making a drunken fool of himself at his 50th birthday party, readers may wonder if the author has an axe to grind. On the contrary, Mary Dearborn views America's biggest Bad Boy novelist with the same judicious eye she trained on Henry Miller in The Happiest Man Alive, candidly discussing faults without feeling obliged to lambaste their possessor. In the case of Norman Mailer, Dearborn's book is less notable for the biographical facts all solidly laid out--but no differently or better than in previous biographies--than for her intelligent understanding of his significance in postwar American culture. Novels like The Naked and the Dead (published in 1948, when Mailer was just 25) are not as important, in Dearborn's view, as such later works as The Armies of the Night (1968) and The Executioner's Song (1979), in which Mailer blurred the line between fact and fiction--using himself as a character to illustrate central issues in American society. Even those who regret the erasure of boundaries fencing off private from public life must admit this is a central development of our time, and Mailer played a key role in making it intellectually respectable--or at least defensible. The many wives, the drunken brawls, the literary feuds are less interesting, though Dearborn conscientiously covers them all. --Wendy Smith