However powerful one finds [The Executioner's Song] there are reservations one may feel about the genre and about its social implications—if only what to make of the literary ambulance-chasing that the true-life novel encourages.
Perhaps the contradictions embodied in the idea of true-life fiction reflect Mailer's ambivalence about whether to take a journalistic or novelistic direction with this fascinating material, involving as it does both dramatic elements of love and death and matters of worldly significance. Gilmore's assertion of his right to have the death sentence carried out and the legal bases of efforts to save him, the evident failure of the penal system to do anything for or with him in his nineteen years of prison, or to protect his victims from him either, the role in the story of Mormonism and Utah history—these and many other matters would repay the attention of a journalist of Mailer's penetration and energy. On the other hand, Gilmore's story partakes something (too little, it turns out) of popular literary traditions about tragic lovers and defiant condemned men …, cowboys, On the Road types, Tobacco Road types which would attract any novelist, especially one with Mailer's romantic turn of mind….
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