Despite Mailer's literary merit, his persistent fetishizing of the black body in his writing during the '60s gets tiresome. Yet we can't ignore these works.
A sense of bitterness remains for those of us mourning the loss of this final great literary lion of the 20th century.
The artists and writers of Paris' Left Bank brought scandal and controversy in their time. In so doing they shaped the artistic and intellectual milieu of the modern world.
There's a ghostly suggestion of Philip Roth's writing voice in Portnoy's Complaint in this novel; a relatively calm voice, this time in the third person, documenting the madness.
