The good news is that Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song … is a superb piece of writing. It has the scope and wallop of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy; its realism contains echoes of Zola and Frank Norris and James T. Farrell; and it reaffirms the vitality and the validity of the social novel, which, having fled underground with the advent of the Cold War, has now re-emerged with incredible pulsing power. The Executioner's Song is (or should be) the occasion for rousing cheers.

In spare, detached, almost journalistic prose Mailer demonstrates that he is a master of suspenseful narration and of character building through adroit use of quotations, dialogue, and stark personal interactions. The result is a camera-eye focus on the underside of American society; on the loathsomeness of some of its inhabitants who exist in mirror image to cultivated society; on the failure of our penal system to regenerate its inmate-victims; and on the devilish role of the press in publicizing Gilmore's final days.

Mailer eschews tractarian moralism: It is enough to grip the reader and to fix his gaze steadily on the human lemons that American society produces…. With its relentless authenticity, Mailer's volume forces us to confront the fact that life in the Lower Depths is just as American as sour apple pie.

The first part of the book centers on Gilmore, Nicole, their circle, and the killing. It is written (deliberately, I am certain) in very short paragraphs and in the voices of those who supplied the information. Mailer's aim is to create an atmosphere of authenticity from which the authorial presence is absent. He does not judge; more difficult, he asks understanding.

In the second section, as in the first, Mailer writes in many voices, none of them his own. The effect is eerie. In twang and drawl his people strive for the pretentiousness of schooled speech, yet slip easily into television colloquialisms, into phrases right out of beauty-shop magazines. The legal voices of the second section, dry and drained, bespeak the inhumanity of justice and dessicated law and lawyers.

Mailer has written a fascinating and wholly disturbing book that captures the rawness, the crudity, the violence and the inhumanities in American life. He raises basic questions that cry out for answers. Why a Gilmore? Why a Nicole Baker? Why wasted lives? Why a cheap killing? Why the firing squad? Has the American Dream turned, for too many, into a Nightmare?

You won't find the answers in The Executioner's Song. What you will find is the daring work of a man who is willing to raise the basic social issues of our age.