Books: Doom as Theater

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THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG

by Norman Mailer

Little, Brown; 1056 pages; $16.95

Norman Mailer drives around in such a charismatic prose that even when he merely waves at something, it acquires a shine, a lingering phosphorescence. It is the Heisenberg principle of his own egomania.

Mailer has tested this magic on the Viet Nam War, American presidential politics, the women's movement, the moon program. He tries it now upon another American public event that possessed, even before he wrote about it, a certain Mailerian quality: the execution, early in 1977, of Gary Gilmore, 36, a Utah murderer who refused to appeal his conviction and death sentence and demanded that the state kill him. Utah obliged, but only after a ritual that turned Gilmore into a grotesque celebrity. Shortly before the prisoner was seated in front of a dirty mattress to face the firing squad, ABC-TV's Geraldo Rivera was screaming into his mike to his producers at Good Morning, America in New York: "Kill the Rona segment. Get rid of it. Give me air. You'll be able to hear the shots. I promise. You'll be able to hear the shots."

Mailer is the last and no doubt the most intelligent participant in the complicated travesty of Gilmore's death. The writer has mobilized a shrewdness to match Gilmore's own punkish daring and jailhouse self-abnegation. Old Aquarius has silenced his bustling, manic, intrusive voice. His prose in this thousand-page trek is a Conestoga of American plain style: it is banal, idiomatic and somehow grainy, like the scenes in 1950s pornographic films in which the characters meet and part like neighborhood dogs, the men never taking their socks off.

It is difficult to tell entirely whether Mailer or various tape recorders are to be congratulated for The Executioner's Song. Mailer seems to have undertaken the project mostly for money. He never met Gilmore but acquired an immense pile of tapes from a hustler named Larry Schiller, the entrepreneur who had earlier promoted deals involving Jack Ruby, Marilyn Monroe and Susan Atkins of the Manson gang. Mailer spent additional weeks interviewing Gilmore's family, his girlfriend Nicole Barrett, and surrounding bit players.

A skeptic who contemplates Mailer's labors in orchestrating all these interviews is tempted to think that he deserves the Nobel Prize for Typing. But Mailer does not work stupidly; the flat, banal voices mustered here soon become haunting. The book is like an immense issue of the National Enquirer being endlessly explicated until it is forced to yield some truth. Gilmore's story is a sort of immense white-trash saga; he accomplishes his victory even in death by calling down all kinds of electronic gods to attend: photographers, wire services, television networks, and at last even the bardic Mailer. No one else has so well caught the logic by which small creeps become celebrities, even when they entertain us with their doom.