Writing in brief, widely spaced-apart paragraphs, Mailer laces together a string of disquieting anecdotes [about condemned killer Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song], creating an atmosphere of friction and frayed nerves: fear at the heart of an empty calm.
The early chapters are suspenseful—doubly suspenseful: The reader not only waits for Gilmore's nerves to snap, but also for Mailer to make an all-trumpets-raised-in-tribute entrance as Aquarius or The Reporter or The Existential Detective. Instead, Mailer slyly—wisely—cloaks himself in invisibility and keeps a watchful distance…. He shadows Gilmore, shooting him from a dozen angles, darting in and out of the minds of his victims, lovers, enemies, and kinfolks. Free of psychometaphysical bombast (remember the anagrammatic analysis in Marilyn, the apocalyptic epiphanies of The Faith of Graffiti?), The Executioner's Song is a study of shallows and surfaces, of moods that curl like smoke or harden into hateful fists.
Nearly 800 pages into the book, Mailer reports New West writer Barry Farrell's reaction to Gilmore's tapes of his In Cold Blood escapades "His account fell into the same narrative style every hustler and psychopath would give you of the most boring, or of the most extraordinary evening—we did this and then, man, like we did that. Episodic and unstressed." Gilmore's narrative style becomes Mailer's: Episodic, unstressed, The Executioner's Song is an epic-scaled psychopathic reverie. Can such a book become a boomer on the best-seller list? Doubtful. Just as a lot of readers declined to ride with Aquarius to the moon, they may refuse to take an 1100-page trek in the company of a scrawny, hollow-cheeked Mormon-killer. Too bad; it's their loss. For the book is often crisp, absorbing, scary, and startlingly funny—the first near-to-greatness book that Mailer has published since Miami and the Siege of Chicago.
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