Writing in brief, widely spaced-apart paragraphs, Mailer laces together a string of disquieting anecdotes [about condemned killer Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song], creating an atmosphere of friction and frayed nerves: fear at the heart of an empty calm.

The early chapters are suspenseful—doubly suspenseful: The reader not only waits for Gilmore's nerves to snap, but also for Mailer to make an all-trumpets-raised-in-tribute entrance as Aquarius or The Reporter or The Existential Detective. Instead, Mailer slyly—wisely—cloaks himself in invisibility and keeps a watchful distance…. He shadows Gilmore, shooting him from a dozen angles, darting in and out of the minds of his victims, lovers, enemies, and kinfolks. Free of psychometaphysical bombast (remember the anagrammatic analysis in Marilyn, the apocalyptic epiphanies of The Faith of Graffiti?), The Executioner's Song is a study of shallows and surfaces, of moods that curl like smoke or harden into hateful fists.

Nearly 800 pages into the book, Mailer reports New West writer Barry Farrell's reaction to Gilmore's tapes of his In Cold Blood escapades "His account fell into the same narrative style every hustler and psychopath would give you of the most boring, or of the most extraordinary evening—we did this and then, man, like we did that. Episodic and unstressed." Gilmore's narrative style becomes Mailer's: Episodic, unstressed, The Executioner's Song is an epic-scaled psychopathic reverie. Can such a book become a boomer on the best-seller list? Doubtful. Just as a lot of readers declined to ride with Aquarius to the moon, they may refuse to take an 1100-page trek in the company of a scrawny, hollow-cheeked Mormon-killer. Too bad; it's their loss. For the book is often crisp, absorbing, scary, and startlingly funny—the first near-to-greatness book that Mailer has published since Miami and the Siege of Chicago.

Nearly everybody in Book One (titled "Western Voices") lives in other people's spaces, in hollows carved out by drugs and indifference. Mailer writes about Utah as if it were a foreign country, as if he were Peter Handke just off the Greyhound, dazed and fascinated by America's eerie splendors. Stretching out into the distance is a twilight-toned suicide landscape. Yes, if murder is a symphonic explosion (muses Rojack in An American Dream), suicide is pale light, soft dreams, seductive whispers. Moving through a world of bland, dreamy ominousness, Gilmore emerges not as an outlaw or demon but as a bright cruel force contending with other forces; and contending with himself, as he pops Fiorinal to soothe his migraines. His homicidal longings make dead air crackle into sinister life.

Karma, reincarnation, occult reckonings, suicide, murder, machismo, cancer, sex, WASP authoritarianism, psychopathic rage—all of Mailer's obsessions are in Book One of The Executioner's Song, and he's dramatized them in a slangy, unadorned style that carries a light lethal chill. It's a heartening recovery for Mailer after the sluggishness of The Fight and The Faith of Graffiti, and one suspects (and hopes!) that he's on his way to composing a Dreiserian classic.

Unfortunately, the second half wobbles and wavers and does corkscrewy spins. In Book Two (titled "Eastern Voices"), Gilmore finds himself strapped into the cockpit of a death-propelled fame machine. (p. 46)

The cast soon becomes crowded with celebrities…. The pace picks up … and yet none of this noisy intrigue is as compelling as the catastrophes that quietly uncoil in Book One. Mailer's I-am-a-camera technique isn't nearly so evocative when the lens is trained on lawyers and TV producers instead of losers, nymphos, nickel-and-dime drug peddlers, and stricken Mormon widows. Moreover, he's written so ringingly about the monkey-see, monkey-do conformity of the media in past pieces that their antics here make for stale comedy. At times nothing seems to propel the author (and the reader) forward except inertia, duty, and Spartan will. And when Mailer starts giving you the life story of every lawyer before the bar, you long for a swashbuckling editor to gallop in like Zorro and start slashing away.

Worse: Mailer makes the grievous blunder of trying to rehabilitate the reputation of his all-star researcher Lawrence Schiller. (pp. 46, 48)

In a "true life novel" in which a psychopath's innocent victims are sketched in quick sharp strokes, it's an insult to trot out the celestial violins for a slap-happy beaver like Schiller.

So many things go wrong in this thick doorstop—chapter after chapter cries out for cutting, sentences slacken and shrivel, a prison ditty lifted from Maidstone mars the final page…. And yet you feel that Mailer has pulled off something phenomenal—that he's captured loneliness, discontinuity, and druggy squalor better than anyone, even Joan "Bad Nerves" Didion. If only Mailer had remained faithful to the Western Voices and let the Eastern Voices be damned. (p. 48)