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Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song: A True Life Novel (Little, Brown, 1979) For a few months after his parole in late 1976, until his death by firing squad in early 1977, convicted killer Gary Gilmore was front-page news. His decision to seek the death penalty rather than accept a sentence of life in prison was emblematic of a wholesale failure of the American prison system to reform its inmates. The way in which he handled his death—with a kind of sexy nihilism—made him an icon. The Executioner's Song is Mailer's retelling of Gilmore's saga, in stark, unadorned language, through the reconstruction of letters sent by Gilmore to prisoners and family members, as well as interviews Gilmore conducted with an entrepreneur who bought the movie rights to his story. Gilmore is the perfect subject for Mailer—an enormous persona representative of a bundle of American ironies—and Mailer uses his story as occasion for his own journalistic shtick: true life as novel, reporting portrayed in such a way as to become high art. Frank McConnell writes in the New Republic, "...what Mailer, like a talented director, has done in The Executioner's Song is to select, cut and shape preexisting material into a creation that reflects equally the reality of his own time and the reality of his own imagination: so much so that we do not know whether to be more dazzled by the reflection outward or the one inward." (October 27, 1979, Page 28) MORE: Gary Gilmore resource |
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