Greetings, and welcome back again as together we venture on that intrepid expedition to gather and cherish the finest treasure of all, neither gold nor ghost orchid, neither Manet triptych nor mauve taaffeite, but rather the cornerstones of civilization, Literature.

Today I offer Norman Mailer’s novels, ranked from least great to greatest – not counting Transit To Narcissus, which is of academic interest, or Executioner’s Song, which I’m counting as a biography because it is a biography (some people need to be told).

Norman Mailer's Novels Ranked in Ascending Order of Greatness: 

10. The Gospel According To The Son (1997): the life of Jesus Christ from the viewpoint of Jesus Christ - like George Moore’s The Brook Kerith, it’s brilliant for what it is, I just struggle to find interest in the subject at all. His portrait of the Devil is memorable, though: he comes back to it in The Castle In The Forest. James Wood wrote a review of Gospel called “He Is Finished” which I found very hard to forgive but I would have to admit, even if Wood was kicking Mailer when he was down, Mailer was down.

9.  The Deer Park (1955): while it has its moments, it’s an oddly bloodless bit of work from Mailer, who didn’t go back to novels for ten years after this. Later he wrote a play of the same material, and the play is the true realisation of what he only gestures at here. It’s fine for a 1950s novel and was nearly made into a film in the 00s, which might have been very good if it had joined us in existing.

8. Of Women & Their Elegance (1979): the life of Marilyn Monroe from the viewpoint of Marilyn Mon - hmm. I don't struggle to find interest to quite the same degree as Gospel, but surely this wasn't the best use of his time. It’s a respectfully and cleverly crafted novella that never really feels necessary. It’s like he’s still trying to convince her she should have gone for him instead of Miller. I wouldn't blame him, but 1979? Possibly a bit belated. 

7. The Naked & The Dead (1948): Quite the debut, of course, but barely much like the novelist Mailer was to become. It is a great war novel with a remarkably cutting political edge. It is also written in a code that says "I Love You, Hemingway" many thousands of times. In technique, his later work leaves it far behind, and he uses “fug” for “fuck”, which gets old fast. 

6. Barbary Shore (1951): again, a bit on the nose by later standards, but Mailer’s second and only avowedly Marxist novel is where he really gets going and it still holds up. A big risk to write this when he did, with McCarthyism well under way. I’m quite a fan of it. The first glimmers of his style show up here and you can see how valuable it is for a writer to realise that mixed metaphors are actually fine for certain effects that they might perhaps need if they’re not trying to write like either Hemingway or Evelyn Waugh. If I were switching things around, this is the one that would most likely make it into my top 5 in a different mood. 

The Top 5: 

5. Tough Guys Don’t Dance: Mailer unbuckles his belt and bangs this one out for the sake of it, and almost accidentally produces an enjoyable parody of noir-thrillers but more noticeably a piss-take of himself, and at the same time his clapback to those who dismissed him as a rapey John Wayne-ish bastard. It’s full of digressions and gorgeous writing that he hasn’t bothered to restrain (good!) and completely unhinged scenes, and a plot that shows why he didn’t like writing plots, all exactly the kind of thing that makes Mailer Mailer. Better than it’s even supposed to be. The narrator's Dad is a great character. I won't say much about the film of it that Mailer directed, but suffice to say that Mailer deliberately making his cast give absurd performances because he didn't actually give a shit, makes a case-study in why Mailer was, and remains, a memorable individual. 

4. Why Are We In Vietnam (1967): another severely deranged splodge from Big Norm, as can be ascertained from the very notion that this is, on some level, Mailer’s comedy novel. The style he picks for the narrator has to be read to be believed, but out of all the sheer bizarreness, there come some utterly cold, haunting moments. England has had its rotating cake-stand of bad-boy writers “with a fresh modern voice that explodes off the page and drags British fiction kickin and screamin into the 80s/90s/21^st century”, but they look very English indeed compared to this. Mailer’s idea of a bold approach is a whooole other level and not exactly what you’d call lapidary prose. “The violence of the language here,” my tutor said, “enacts the violence of America.” That is one way to put it.

Now it may seem, or even be, slightly rash to put Why in the top half of Mailer’s fiction since it is not by any remote means a “traditional” (ie proper) novel. It stands on its own as a unique artefact, with A Clockwork Orange as its only maybe-precursor unless we trace the origins back to Finnegans Wake, though everything from Faulkner to Catcher In The Rye to The Naked Lunch is satirically digested along the way to producing this. But it holds its ground in my mind because Mailer always wanted to take his writing to the absolute extreme limit and this is where he reached it. There was nowhere further to go beyond this, for him or anyone else except Pynchon. (He could, however, sidestep along the edge – Ancient Evenings came next.)

Incidentally one of the works that Mailer seems to burlesque here is Deliverance and if someone were lazy enough to call this “like Deliverance on acid”, I would object but not that strenuously. In fact, Deliverance only came out three years after this, which makes me think Dickey had some balls on him. A thankless task to write a novel that’s “like Why Are We In Vietnam, off drugs.” 

3. The Castle In The Forest (2007): Nobody could possibly have wanted this novel at all (Hitler. As a little kid. And Satan’s in it. Sure. OK. Why not.), let alone want Mailer to make it his last work. But he did, so here we are. It feels full of unfulfilled promise, a nagging sense of Mailer being made to hold back at times, but it is the novel where Mailer finally makes Evil the theme of his novel, as he had been saying he wanted to do since the 60s if not earlier. And wow, it’s good. And wow, it’s weird as fuck. Full of terrible ideas that he should not have run with, but which he makes work because he's just that good, it is an extremely dark and entirely unrepresentative note for him to go out on. Unrepresentative except for its mastery of style. Harlot’s Ghost would have made a better mic-drop, but he wrote Gospel after that, so I’m glad we’ve got this instead. Amis says that “one thinks of The Castle In The Forest with respect but no-one would seriously compare it to Harlot’s Ghost”. Impeccably fair, and yet I wonder if this won’t be the one, out of all of them, that lasts if the rest get forgotten. After all, if people want to read novels about Adolf Hitler, their options are limited. 

2. An American Dream (1965): this is the most Mailer of all Mailer novels. This is the epitome of Mailer. I love this book. The writing is incredible, the themes he’s interested in are vertiginous metaphysical craziness, the imagery is unforgettable, the whole mood and vibe of it is unique. It has that interesting mix that Mailer flirts with, of being ultra commercial pulp and high modernist at the same time. A 400 page, slightly toned down version of this, Mailer Does Manhattan, would have easily been the settled choice for Great American Novel. 

But no, Mailer prefers to lash out this fever-pitch hallucination, written in monthly instalments (which is mind-blowing because it reads like it was written in one long, moon-howling night), according to some versions of history by sending off the first draft to the publisher each time. The anguish of Genius is not to be assuaged by our silly mortal notions of editing. Incredible if true. To think of the years that most novelists slave over their poignantly shit autobiographical dull-fests, with a nice turn of phrase every thirty pages in the forlorn hope that it might keep our blood-pressure from dropping any lower. An American Dream, on the other hand, was made into a film called See You In Hell Darling, which was on Channel 5 and surely must be the dumbest thing I have ever seen, and to be clear, I’ve seen Killing Them Softly and this was as bad. There’s no justice.

1. = Ancient Evenings (1983, but mostly written in the 70s): Let’s just leave aside that this novel is nuts. Park that. Even without that, it’s really hard to know what to make of Ancient Evenings, since so much of it barely feels like it’s Mailer writing it. Although some of his preoccupations run through it more clearly than in any other of his novels, he has mostly effaced himself from the actual style. Very few people would be able to guess Mailer wrote this book if you quoted a random passage. In style, it reads almost more like a late George Moore novel, as does Gospel According To The Son (though the subject matter this time is precisely not like a George Moore novel). It feels timeless, and, to quote Book Of Mormon, “I guess that’s kind of what you were going for.” Mailer actually told his publisher, “I care who reads it in a hundred years time, I don’t care who reads it now.” (Banner day for us, thought his marketing team.) 

And it works, that’s the thing. I can’t think of any other modern writer who can offer an achievement on this level. Other people have written extraordinary literary edifices, true, but to all of them we can ask, “Yes, but it’s not set in ancient motherfucking Egypt, is it?” Because that’s a pretty amazing thing to do. And pull off. There is something almost disreputable in how transporting this novel is, how grand and eerie its atmosphere is. The other, not touchstone exactly, but the other association I have for it would be something like pre-Raphaelite poetry or even early Yeats. A wild book in many ways, but ultimately with an elusive uncanny quality, at times like watching a solemn ritual in a stone temple and just catching echoes of their murmurs and whispers. Plus there’s butt-sex, but hey, you know.

1. = Harlot's Ghost (1991): the other one of his two masterpieces, and I cannot quite give it the advantage over the visionary weirdness of Ancient Evenings, although the 20^th century setting allows Mailer to soar high in language he doesn’t have to moderate for fear of anachronism, giving him back the full range of his formidable resources as a sentence-maker, and let’s him get his teeth into the Cold War. Some of the absolute greatest writing he ever did, maybe his best. The American Left thought it was a betrayal, the Russian critics hailed it as the Great American Novel, making him a kind of reverse-Solzhenitsyn. 

If there was one conspicuous whim in Mailer’s life, it was of course to write the Great American Novel. And for all that can be said of his predecessors in the Great American GAN Chase, jostled in the melee though he is by Melville, Twain, Norris, Wolfe, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Warren, Bellow, Doctorow, Dickey and whoever else thought it was worth a go to write one as if there weren’t already a bunch of others before (and DeLillo, Wallace and Franzen give the impression that they were blithely trotting along at the tail-end of the revelry after Harlot’s Ghost – twice in Wallace’s case), I still think Harlot’s Ghost is lead contender (actually I think they should give it the crown and have done with the debate), not only for its scale (a vast sprawl, but I wouldn’t have it any shorter) and ingenuity (the ways Mailer uses one narrative conceit to incorporate everything he could possibly want) but for its sheer literary superiority: none of them control and command the page, let alone the tome, quite like Mailer does. (Ernest Goddamn Hemingway, interestingly, never really wrote one that could fit the bill. He did his bit for Great Novels, this I do not libel – but Hem was more of an Ancient Evenings guy – fuck America, my masterpieces veto all borders. Hemingway On Manhattan is a novel we are decidedly blessed to have been spared, as we can see from the novels of John O'Hara.)

Structurally it might be objected that H’s G is more like four or five novels stuck into one, but a) I’m not sure what difference that makes, and b) there is a pressure and momentum to the narrator’s life which, to me, never really lets up. An odd fact – out of all the striking and unforgettable things that happen in the novel, including the Bay of Pigs, the bit I remember the most is when he drops someone’s painted egg. I mean, you can’t take this guy anywhere. It’s a paralyzing moment even to read, and a great rebuke to the popular myth that Mailer was all bombast and bigness. Harlot’s Ghost is actually a wealth of moments that never leave you, big and small – Harlot’s lectures and self-justifications, Harry’s elaborate tail-chasing attempts to cover up his own mistakes, the audio-tape they make to ruin a target’s marriage, the revelations of the homosexuality of his fellow agents, the madness of his macho rival Dix (Dix! Fuck’s sake, Norm), dozens of other great images and scenes, and as many great lines. Yes, I would really have liked to have Harlot’s Grave, which would have taken us to Vietnam (!) and 1970s Hollywood (?) and, radically, had an ending. 

But I guess he knew it couldn’t be done. He couldn’t write all that just for the sake of not leaving Harlot’s Ghost on a cliffhanger. He wrote half a dozen other little things instead, and a biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, and The Castle In The Forest, anything but Harlot’s Grave. He had hundreds of pages of notes for it - he said they weighed on him. He told people his Oswald biography was the sequel, he told people Castle In The Forest was a sequel in theme. He just didn’t write the sequel. But then, does War & Peace need a sequel? My perhaps contentious answer: No, it doesn’t. And Mailer’s epic is fine as it is. Fine? One of the best novels I have ever read. If Literature has any objective, it’s to be this. Mailer wins. Peace, I’m out.