One of the major obstacles to a proper understanding of Norman Mailer's work is his series of pronouncements on the nature of his ambitions. If these remarks are taken quite literally then Mailer's achievements can easily be distorted. Dotted throughout his writing since 1959, when Advertisements for Myself was published, is a thinly veiled longing to embody the conflicting currents of thought in the twentieth century just as Melville did in the nineteenth. The response to this has often been to regard Mailer's novels as noble but failed efforts and to settle for his journalism as a frequently brilliant but comparatively second-class literary activity. His forays into politics, poetry, biography, literary criticism, the theatre and filmmaking are then relegated to the amateur efforts of a versatile man. This kind of pigeonholing tends to miss the essentially innovatory nature of Mailer's talent.

In The Armies of the Night (1968), Robert Lowell...