Another Norman With a Woman Problem
November 12, 2007
As you can tell from this post, I was no great admirer of the late Norman Mailer, so the endless iterations of the “larger than life ambitious novelist” meme in his obituaries strike me as pretty weak stuff — evidence that the writers are trying to write around the fact that Mailer was a certified Great American Writer who produced little that was good, much less great, and a great deal that was simply awful. And, like Johann Hari, I’m bothered by the fact that Mailer’s near-psychotic reaction to feminism — and his history of terrible emotional and physical violence against women in his life — is being treated as a non-issue by entirely too many writers.
January 18, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Isn’t “S.C.U.M. Manifesto” (Society to Cut up Men) by author Valerie Solana) an example of emotional and physical violence? At least Mailer didn’t shoot three people in a botched serial murder attempt. There are women who have issues with men and men who have issues with women — it’s a dance that will never end. Hopefully, it will not often involve guns, but given America’s love affair with deadly weapons, I would expect they’ll keep killing each other.