You people who have proudly never read, and never intend to read, Mailer are cheating yourselves. Kimball’s hatchet job says some arguable (and even true) things, but relying on Roger Kimball for an assessment of Norman Mailer is like relying on a vegetarian for a trustworthy review of a barbecue joint.

Most of Mailer’s books were bad, but if you can’t find something excellent in The Armies of the Night or The Executioner’s Song, you’re not looking.

Instead, you’re probably looking to disguise a sense of moral superiority in the costume of literary analysis. It’s easy to deplore a lot of Mailer’s behavior and roll your eyes at his theorizing.

His metaphysics aside, he had a fantastic prose style that found and brought out connections–some plausible, some ludicrous–between highly disparate things. If that’s not a laudable writerly achievment, I don’t know what is. And he could be deliberately funny, which is something you can say about almost none of his detractors.

Of course, the conservative (not to say the reactionary) position is one which insists on equating the literary value of something with the “values” it embodies. Leave it up to those people, and we’d never have seen Ulysses or Lolita.

And that Elizabeth Hardwick “parody” was awful, not because it was so indistinguishable from its target, but because it simply–as bad parodies always do–repeated its target’s tropes without any feel for or ability to mimic its style. Elizabeth Hardwick is incapable of writing a good parody of anyone but herself, which she does on a regular basis.

In other words, what The Shadow said.