Another Norman With a Woman Problem

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.