Mailer’s Folly

Two months after his death, just as the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin opens their extensive archive of over one thousand boxes of Norman Mailer’s papers to the public and to researchers, The Guardian’s Mark Hooper thinks about Mailer’s Ancient Evenings:

I had the rare pleasure of chancing across a copy while staying in a rented cottage over the holidays. To say I read it would be an exaggeration, but I read bits of it, with a growing sense of bewildered awe. It's an unintentionally hilarious tale of mysticism and royal bloodlines in ancient Egypt, a grandly misguided folly in the best traditions of Mailer.

Oh, ouch.

More ouch: I suspect that this passage from the press release the Ransom Center sent out to let the public know that the papers were ready for perusal would have had the late author reeling:

“Norman Mailer’s ambition was to write the greatest American novel,” said Thomas F. Staley, director of the Ransom Center. “Perhaps he failed, but he was indeed a major American writer. His engagement with the culture, sometimes combative and bombastic, but always interesting, made him a dominant literary and cultural figure of the second half of the 20th century.”

The Guardian piece is here. The Ransom Center press release is here.