A review by gregbrown
The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History by Norman Mailer
2.0
What a weird mixed bag of a book, one that jumps too often between moods and styles to really feel cohesive (or purposeful in that jumping).
The opening is sort of fractionally amusing in how Mailer seems to have a pseudo-paranoid grievance against everyone, but mostly just comes off an irritating portrait of a jackass. Once Mailer starts participating in the march itself he tones it down a bit, with help from anecdotes about the various sideshows throughout the route and at the Pentagon. Once he's arrested and jailed, it takes the time for some interesting but brief character portraits, as well as more of a pensive tone. And in the final section (The Novel as History), Mailer removes himself and zooms out to show how the march was developed, engineered, and the larger course of events those days—which is great and would have been way more valuable and interesting earlier in the book.
It's very difficult for me to separate a judgment of the book from a judgment of Mailer himself—and I'm not even sure that such a separation would be advisable. Mailer himself seems trapped in the cycle where he dumps a ton of himself in the books, is personally unpleasant, gets bad reviews for those books which he takes personally because he's in them a lot, and then uses that as fuel to become even more personally unpleasant. (Does he moderate any between this and The Executioner's Song?) And his politics are a fuckin' mess; I'm kinda astonished he didn't become one of the sixties intellectuals who took a rightward turn as the decades went on. As is it seems like he really wants to be a prudish conservative but is held back by an anti-authoritarian streak, admission of the force of Marx's logic, and a desire to not be disinvited from the liberal social scene. Seems like a real fucko to me, exactly the kind of guy who would stab his own wife twice at a party.
All in all, I'm kinda astonished that this book won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, and suspect that both committees were more endeared by the novelty of the style. This was just a year or two after In Cold Blood kicked off the "non-fiction novel" trend, after all. Might still read Miami and the Siege of Chicago eventually, but I've had my fill of Mailer for quite a while.
The opening is sort of fractionally amusing in how Mailer seems to have a pseudo-paranoid grievance against everyone, but mostly just comes off an irritating portrait of a jackass. Once Mailer starts participating in the march itself he tones it down a bit, with help from anecdotes about the various sideshows throughout the route and at the Pentagon. Once he's arrested and jailed, it takes the time for some interesting but brief character portraits, as well as more of a pensive tone. And in the final section (The Novel as History), Mailer removes himself and zooms out to show how the march was developed, engineered, and the larger course of events those days—which is great and would have been way more valuable and interesting earlier in the book.
It's very difficult for me to separate a judgment of the book from a judgment of Mailer himself—and I'm not even sure that such a separation would be advisable. Mailer himself seems trapped in the cycle where he dumps a ton of himself in the books, is personally unpleasant, gets bad reviews for those books which he takes personally because he's in them a lot, and then uses that as fuel to become even more personally unpleasant. (Does he moderate any between this and The Executioner's Song?) And his politics are a fuckin' mess; I'm kinda astonished he didn't become one of the sixties intellectuals who took a rightward turn as the decades went on. As is it seems like he really wants to be a prudish conservative but is held back by an anti-authoritarian streak, admission of the force of Marx's logic, and a desire to not be disinvited from the liberal social scene. Seems like a real fucko to me, exactly the kind of guy who would stab his own wife twice at a party.
All in all, I'm kinda astonished that this book won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, and suspect that both committees were more endeared by the novelty of the style. This was just a year or two after In Cold Blood kicked off the "non-fiction novel" trend, after all. Might still read Miami and the Siege of Chicago eventually, but I've had my fill of Mailer for quite a while.