Word: mailer
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...more important is the omnipresent hand of a born novelist, buoyantly bending and shaping each scene to his literary way, and successfully creating a single, superb, comic figure of the author himself. With a courageous measure of self-mockery, Mailer casts himself in the role of a black-humor antihero: a hard-drinking, self-important and snobbish dandy who, believing himself the star, is forever stumbling toward the camera, when all the time he is really only an extra, a bit player who will inevitably be cut out of the film...
Bark & Bite. Mailer indulges his hero with a splendid deadpan pomposity, reinforced by the fact that he refers to himself throughout in the third person. The reader first meets him in his Brook lyn Heights apartment, picking up a ringing telephone as if it were a pistol loaded for Russian Roulette. "On impulse, thereby sharpening his instinct as a gambler, he took spot plunges: once in a while he would pick up his own phone. On this morning in September, 1967, he lost his bet." The caller is a militant antiwar organizer and old Harvard classmate, who extracts from Mailer...
...Mailer evokes some marvelously mordant closeups of his fellow "weekend revolutionaries" as they try to do their ritualistic protest thing quickly, so that they can get back to New York for a dinner party. "Lowell's shoulders had a slump," writes Mailer. "One did not achieve the languid grandeurs of that slouch in one generation-the grandsons of the first sons had best go through the best troughs in the best eating clubs at Harvard before anyone in the family could try for such elegant note." Ideologue Paul Goodman "looked like the sort of old con who had first...
...Mailer always returns to himself. With an "egotism of curious disproportions," he catalogues his breakfast menus, his cures for the common cancers, even the virtues of each of his four wives. Sometimes he is the little boy full of comic-strip fantasies about riding around in a red helicopter, taking on the whole might of the U.S. Air Force and of "corporation-land" by shooting paint at the enemy choppers. At other times he fancies himself an exiled princeling (though from what country defies the imagination...
...English county seat decrying the servant problem and denouncing Labour amid outraged pipe smoke. He accurately describes himself as neo-Victorian in regard to sex; he speaks ill of homosexuality and masturbation, and proclaims that "without guilt, sex was meaningless." In fact, one sometimes wonders whether Mailer is not really an undercover agent of the old order, trying to undermine the Left from within...