The Motherfucker Couldn’t Write.

Review: Tough Guy, by Richard Bradford.

There is an essay one can write about Norman Mailer now and be very popular. It can take Random House’s story on him at face value and believe that they canceled a collection of his essays on the whims of the staffer( without any evidence to back this story up). From there it can stay in conjecture and rhetoric about the Mailer myth, and talk about how he (said he) had a staggering ambition, and (said he) aimed high in his work; and (said he) tried to capture America in his works. You could specify how he (said he) tried to write “The Great American Novel” so many times, and he ( claimed he) touched on the darkness in (what he thought was) the American character and psyche. From there, it would mesh all the cultural debates about artists and history together and claim that Mailer is the prototypical imperfect white artist creative bedeviled by the woke mob; and that anyone who disagrees is going against the very fonts that made American literature what it is.

You would get a lot of sympathy if you wrote that article. One personally thinks of the PNW internet literary influencers who race-baited vigils commemorating Paul Celan’s centennial on the eve of the Ukraine war, and imagines they would give the new spate of Mailer studies backers that reaction. What Richard Bradford has done is write a book for the people those…