[To] write history in Mailer's style requires even more strenuous efforts with language than does the writing of a novel or a play. Having more claims to preexistent forms of reality than novels do, history will give up the shape it has assumed to some other shape only under enormous stylistic (or scholarly) pressure. In the absence of such pressure, we're left to contemplate only the failure of the efforts to exert it, to study the drama of confrontation between a doughty self and resistant historical forces. (p. 168)

His books are about Mailer, to be sure, about the man as he writes history as well as about the man who tried to participate in its making. But they are meant to reveal the true nature of the historical events and issues with which he has involved himself. Similarly, while his metaphors do reveal the workings of his mind...