[One] of the many edges on which Mailer has always precariously balanced his career and reputation is the edge between fiction and what we like to call (forgetting how fictive it really is) "real life." The subtitle of his best political book, The Armies of the Night, is History as a Novel: The Novel as History. And, seriously as that subtitle may have been meant in Armies, it takes on even more serious meaning in The Executioner's Song (subtitled A True Life Novel). For if "fiction" means anything at all, it means an intelligent shaping and ordering of the inchoate stuff of life itself.

He was lucky in his subject. Gary Gilmore was a loser, a violent thug who, after spending half his life in jails, chose to accept his sentence of death rather than spend the rest of his life there. But he was—is, in this...