Norman Mailer: Four Books of the 1960s (LOA #305): An American Dream / Why Are We in Vietnam? / The Armies of the Night / Miami and the Siege of Chicago (Library of America Norman Mailer Edition)

Bought these as cat food/water bowls. Perfect for that! They don’t tip over,; cat uses them easily; clean easily and well. Not sure I would use them at table but would use them as cooking bowls.

good for my collection

“Norman Mailer: Four Books of the 1960s” is a terrific contribution to the LOA. Perhaps “The Armies of the Night” with its (at times mock) epic account of Mailer’s dissident, its unforgettable and emotionally charged evocation of the 1967 March on the Pentagon, its acute analysis of the war and its protestor and its powerfully innovative style is the only hard-to-dispute masterpiece in the set. However, all of “Armies”’ companion pieces can lay some claim to immortality. “Miami and the Siege of Chicago,” less consistent and unified than "Armies," is rich in “Armies” reportorial strengths. “An American Dream,” despite alienating lapses into misogyny and a questionable resolution provides us with extended passages of some of our literature’s strongest evocation of urban male intellectual anxiety -- sexual, careerist, existential, you name it. These passages powerful enough to compare with Faulkner’s depiction of the tensions of such rural agonists as the Compson brothers of “The Sound and the Fury” and the Joe Christmas of “Light in August.” Moreover, a poorly realized architectural form is a common price of admission to many of Mailer’s long stretches of eloquence. (To wit, Mailer once wrote that the quality of his work was “not measured by its aesthetic perfection … [but] by the amount of life it generates.”) “Why Are We in Vietnam?” provides a depiction teenage anxieties – in tension with patriarchal authority, Texan machismo, and the shadow of Vietnam —that those who find its dense William Burroughs like schtick to their tastes might find this account of teenage anxieties quite as impressive as Salinger’s riffs on prep school alienation in “The Catcher in the Rye” or, giving the book's gravity, it's due, Robert Musil's "The Confusions of Young Torless." Unifying these four books is acute insight into the America of the sixties, one facet of which is well captured by Robert Begiebing in a journal reviewer when he stresses "Mailer’s catalogue of the schizophrenic hypocrisies in American life—our warring internal dualisms.” Enthralling reading throughout.