[One] of the many edges on which Mailer has always precariously balanced his career and reputation is the edge between fiction and what we like to call (forgetting how fictive it really is) "real life." The subtitle of his best political book, The Armies of the Night, is History as a Novel: The Novel as History. And, seriously as that subtitle may have been meant in Armies, it takes on even more serious meaning in The Executioner's Song (subtitled A True Life Novel). For if "fiction" means anything at all, it means an intelligent shaping and ordering of the inchoate stuff of life itself.

He was lucky in his subject. Gary Gilmore was a loser, a violent thug who, after spending half his life in jails, chose to accept his sentence of death rather than spend the rest of his life there. But he was—is, in this book—also a walking compendium of everything that had, long since, become characteristic of the archetypal Mailer hero. (pp. 28-9)

Moreover, by the time he became front-page news, Gilmore had begun to realize another and less savory aspect of Mailer's own career: that of the existential hero trapped among clowns and hucksters capitalizing on his private decision, and even seducing him into complicity in the packaging of what ought to be, in its purity, unpackageable. (p. 29)

Gilmore (like Jim in Lord Jim) is both the center of this book and its least visible, least knowable character. Mailer never once allows himself to narrate events from Gilmore's own point of view: even when telling the story of the first, solitary killing, he does not indulge in any speculations about what the killer may have thought or felt at that crucial moment. It is a narrative technique of real genius, particularly since the narrator at one point or another enters and paraphrases the consciousness of every other character of the book. For all the explanations with which he is surrounded, Gilmore remains a mystery—and in remaining a mystery remains (like Jim) one of us.

Granted that Mailer has forged a tale that catches the full ambiguity of life on the edge: can we really call it a creative work, or even more seriously, a work of creative fiction? What has he done, after all, but transcribe, transpose into indirect discourse, and edit the reminiscences of some sad people who happened to cross paths with a penny-ante punk and killer?

Well, in a way he has done nothing more than that. But that is enough, and more than enough. The style of The Executioner's Song is remarkably flat, even at times ungrammatical and improvisational: partly, to be sure, as a result of writing the narrative from the tapes of semiliterate people. But the very clumsiness of these characters' narratives achieves an authentic and very moving rhetoric. Especially in the first half of the book, the half describing Gilmore's life and friends, it is like finding yourself surrounded by corrupted Huckleberry Finns, innocents whose inarticulateness is no longer a shield against the ravages of history, but is still the only shield they have. The prose is like black-and-white stock in documentary filmmaking: we know it is consciously chosen, and yet we also know that it somehow, magically, underscores the reality of what we watch.

Indeed, the association with documentary film makes more sense than that. For what Mailer, like a talented director, has done in The Executioner's Song is to select, cut, and shape preexisting material into a creation that reflects equally the reality of his own time and the reality of his own imagination: so much so that we do not know whether to be more dazzled by the reflection outward or the one inward. If the novel is a mythology constructed to catch the moral ambiguity of its age, then The Executioner's Song is a brilliant, maybe a great, novel. And if The Executioner's Song is not that, we had all better revise our definitions. (p. 30)