I wonder if all modern societies have the same tendency to fetishize criminals as we do?  Mailer after all is notorious for getting Jack Abbott out of prison, only to have him stab a guy in a diner.  William F. Buckley, Mailer's long time nemesis, and a man who should have known better, had his own pet criminal in the 70's.  Seemingly half the artists in America are trying to free the cop killer Mummia Abu-Jamal.  Republicans have G. Gordon Liddy and Ollie North.  Democrats have everyone from Clinton to the IRA to the PLO to FALN and so on.  Of course, the media culture is just drowning in criminals.  We've got OJ trials, the Ramseys, the killer Nanny, Andrew Cunanan, the Menendez brothers, Columbine, etc. and etc. and etc.  And that's just the real people; never mind the fictional creations like Hannibal Lecter.  And we study them and advocate for them and argue about them as if they were talismans or held some kind of secret knowledge that they could reveal to us.  In the end, perhaps it just boils down to a fascination with evil.

Whatever the case, where The Executioner's Song may have once been a compelling look into the world of a criminal and at the machinery of justice, with the added cachet of the nation's first execution in decades, now it all just seems so wearyingly familiar.  Just take the execution angle, not only is the death penalty no longer an issue, we actually live in a country where a liberal Democrat running for President felt like it was good politics to fly home from the campaign trail in order to execute a retarded inmate.  I'm afraid there's just no longer any dramatic tension left in this story.

It is probably Mailer's one unarguably good book, but events have caught up to it and rendered it little more than a mildly interesting anachronism.  And even using fictional techniques, it should not be considered a novel and certainly should not have gotten a Pulitzer for Fiction.

(Reviewed:)

Grade: (B-) Orrin C. Judd

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