What are critics for?

In this case, Kimball’s summation should serve as a warning for future authors – if you’re serious about your writing and its place in posterity, don’t be another Mailer.

Sure, Mailer could be entertaining at times but mostly as a surrogate fantasy maker. Who wouldn’t want fame and the vices one could exploit from it? Yet, Mailer went for the vices.

He was in the end, an intellectual whore selling himself to a decadent intelligensia. He had no shame.

I’ve tried to read some of his books – finished only the one about his running around Provincetown acting the drunk fool. I might attack the one about space flight.