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….

Gilmore's history, Nicole's history are horrifying, sad, moving, and skillfully told in Book One ("Western Voices") in short, forceful paragraphs with extra spaces between, allowing quick shifts among a welter of interesting characters…. Mostly these are trustful, hapless, well-meaning people whom Mailer wisely neither judges nor sympathizes with. He thereby nearly avoids patronizing them on the one hand and on the other associating them too obviously with his own known preoccupations with violence, execution, female masochism, and other tough stuff. Technically he keeps out of the book altogether; there is no evident point of view and no comment, only a matter-of-fact tone perfect for the baroque tale it will unfold, and even enough to conceal that here is, of course, a work of selection and interpretation….

The book is written in an apparently simple style—pure tape recorder, it seems at first—and given the fact that no one can make up things better than the things people actually say, this mode of quiet attention seems right. But maybe it's all made up and Mailer infinitely artful; the text is mined with Mailerisms when you look closely….

The language mainly fits, convinces, but the voice of Mailer himself, once heard, lingers with strange insistence over the voices of the others, except perhaps that of Gilmore himself.

Then you begin to hear the great parodist in Mailer straining to get out, especially when he's representing the thoughts of Lawrence Schiller, his colleague and the central consciousness for much of the book. Schiller is given a number of callous, greedy, self-important, and dishonest thoughts and reactions, presented in a mock Hemingwayese perfectly catching his moral pretentiousness and inherently despicable pursuit….

On the whole the writing is fastidious and, given the lurid material, tasteful. It's just that you keep wondering which are the true parts….

It is finally the fact that all this really happened that moves us most. Thinking about Debbie and Ben is like looking at the photograph of the starving child in the CARE poster. Because that is so serious it demands explanation and reflection that are not forthcoming. Not even a writer of Mailer's skill can make us suspend our realization of history, can stop us from remembering the world and not this shadow of it. Since this is so, to make fictions of them exploits and trivializes these people at the same time that it may seek to ennoble or project them; in the service of a private (but popular!) mythology it takes over their words and thoughts while they are still around to speak for themselves, leaves them, as it were, without words, and diminishes their humanity. (p. 3)

Mailer's misunderstanding or underestimation of Mormonism is a little disappointing; for instance, he makes a lot of Gilmore's ideas about life after death, without realizing the extent to which these are orthodox Mormon beliefs. (pp. 3-4)

The author of a true-life novel tries to have it both ways—to improve the dull, invent the spicy parts, leave out the inconvenient things, and not be held accountable for veracity or completeness. Yet he hopes for significance too. Playing neither by the rules of fiction nor by the rules of fact, he is in danger of sinking into facile sensationalism. The handling of Gilmore's letters is an example here of the inconsistency. Sagaciously edited by a fine writer, they are pretty impressive. Mailer has abridged them "because it seemed fair to show him at his best, not his average." "One wanted to demonstrate the impact of his mind on Nicole, and that was best done by allowing his brain to have its impact on us." Yet Nicole presumably read the letters entire. Mailer finds the real Gary Gilmore a good enough writer only at times, but he gets the advantage of Gilmore's real life death.

No one has mythologized Son of Sam, so fat and creepy. You wonder whether if Gary Gilmore had looked less like a cowboy, this book would have been written. It does have sweep and charity and power; but in the long run it is a kind of socialist-realist ballet, where the redneck killers are recognizable by their bandannas, the nymphos by the "couple of bruises on those juicy thighs," a cast Mailer has assembled before. He seems to have grafted an Eastern urban dream of the Wild West, complete with sixpacks, CBs, and pickup trucks, onto a conventional paradigm about poverty and child abuse eventuating in anomie and murder. This doesn't seem to be quite the truth of Utah or Nicole or Gilmore—and Mailer has given us so much of a powerful and absorbing story, one can only wish to know how it really was. (p. 4)