[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, in its probing, contradictory, fluid movement, they also, he would insist, expose the reality of America. He'll settle for nothing less. It's a heroic ambition, but except in the special circumstances of Armies, where the nature of his participation in events is beautifully synchronized with his writing about them, the ambition is seldom achieved. Mailer is more often than not the overreacher of his times.
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