Dear Mr. Kimball,
Amid the universal blather that has marked the death of Norman Mailer, yours is the voice of reason. Mailer has been a running joke, except among his radical pals. His last few novels have been so awful that only a NYT critic could love them.
I remember being very impressed while in high school with “the Naked and the Dead”, I still think it the best thing he ever wrote. His later political screeds, posturings, swaggerings, and general baloney, made him not the literary Talk of the Town, but the Bad Joke of the Town.
I don’t blame the media for this, but that gang of lefty-liberal critics who thought he was cute–that pseudo-radical chap. And propped him up for all these years.
How could he have survived terrible books like those on Marilyn Monroe and Picasso without them? As the Italians say, “La commedia e finita.”