It is one of those testimonies to the tenacity of self-regard in the literary life that large numbers of people remain persuaded that Norman Mailer is no better than their reading of him. They condescend to him, they dismiss his most original work in favor of the more literal and predictable rhythms of "The Armies of the Night"; they regard "The Naked and the Dead" as a promise later broken and every book since as a quick turn for his creditors, a stalling action, a spangled substitute, tarted up to deceive, for the "big book" he cannot write. In fact he has written this "big book" at least three times now. He wrote it the first time in 1955 with "The Deer Park" and he wrote it a second time in 1965 with "An American Dream" and he wrote it a third time in 1967 with "Why Are We in Vietnam?" and now, with "The Executioner's Song," he has probably written it a fourth. (p. 1)

[In] a meticulously limited vocabulary and a voice as flat as the horizon, [Mailer has written] a novel which takes for its incident and characters real events in the lives of real people. "The Executioner's Song" is ambitious to the point of vertigo, and the exact extent of its ambitiousness becomes clear at the end of the first chapter, when a curious sentence occurs, a sentence designed as a kind of Gothic premonition. Brenda Nicol … has gotten a call from the penitentiary at Marion saying that her cousin Gary Gilmore was coming home—by way of St. Louis, Denver, Salt Lake—to Provo. "With all the excitement," Chapter One of "The Executioner's Song" closes, "Brenda was hardly taking into account that it was practically the same route their Mormon great-grandfather took when he jumped off from Missouri with a handcart near to a hundred years ago, and pushed west with all he owned over the prairies, and the passes of the Rockies, to come to rest at Provo in the Mormon Kingdom of Deseret just fifty miles below Salt Lake."

Against the deliberately featureless simple sentences of "The Executioner's Song," sentences that slide over the mind like conversations at the K-Mart …, the relative complexity and length of this sentence at the end of Chapter One is a chill, a signal that the author is telling us a story of some historical dimension. Notice the intake of breath on the clause "and the passes of the Rockies," notice the long unbroken exhalation that ends in a fall on "just 50 miles below Salt Lake."

It is a largely unremarked fact about Mailer that he is a great and obsessed stylist, a writer to whom the shape of the sentence is the story. His sentences do not get long or short by accident, or because he is in a hurry. Where he does or does not put the comma is a question of considerable concern to him: his revisions on "The Deer Park" are instructive in the extreme. Brenda Nicol may not have been taking into account that handcart, those prairies, those passes of the Rockies, but Mailer was, and, in that one sentence, the terms of the novel had laid themselves out: a connection would be attempted here, a search for a field of negative energy linking these events and these people and the empty melancholy of the place itself.

"The Executioner's Song," then, was to be a novel of the West, and the strongest voices in it, as in the place itself, would be those of women. Men tend to shoot, get shot, push off, move on. Women pass down stories. (pp. 1, 26)

I think no one but Mailer could have dared this book. The authentic Western voice, the voice heard in "The Executioner's Song," is one heard often in life but only rarely in literature, the reason being that to truly know the West is to lack all will to write it down. The very subject of "The Executioner's Song" is that vast emptiness at the center of the Western experience, a nihilism antithetical not only to literature but to most other forms of human endeavor, a dread so close to zero that human voices fade out, trail off, like skywriting. Beneath what Mailer calls "the immense blue of the strong sky of the American West," under that immense blue which dominates "The Executioner's Song," not too much makes a difference.

In a world in which every road runs into the desert or the Interstate or the Rocky Mountains, people develop a pretty precarious sense of their place in the larger scheme.

"The Executioner's Song" is structured in two long symphonic movements: "Western Voices," or Book One, voices which are most strongly voices of women, and "Eastern Voices," Book Two, voices which are not literally those of Easterners but are largely those of men—the voices of the lawyers, the prosecutors, the reporters, the people who move in the larger world and believe that they can influence events. The "Western" book is a fatalistic drift, a tension, an overwhelming and passive rush toward the inevitable events that will end in Gary Gilmore's death. The "Eastern" book is the release of that tension, the resolution, the playing out of the execution…. (p. 26)

The women in the "Western" book are surprised by very little. They do not on the whole believe that events can be influenced. A kind of desolate wind seems to blow through the lives of these women in "The Executioner's Song," all these women who have dealings with Gary Gilmore…. The wind seems to blow away memory, balance. The sensation of falling is constant. (pp. 26-7)

Control is fugitive. Insanity is casual. The love-death seems as good a way of hanging on as any other.

These women move in and out of paying attention to events, of noticing their own fate. They seem distracted by bad dreams, by some dim apprehension of this well of dread, this "unhappiness at the bottom of things." Inside Bessie Gilmore's trailer south of the Portland city line, down a four-lane avenue of bars and eateries and discount stores and a gas station with a World War II surplus Boeing bomber fixed above the pumps, there is a sense that Bessie can describe only as "a suction-type feeling." She fears disintegration. She wonders where the houses in which she once lived have gone, she wonders about her husband being gone, her children gone, the 78 cousins she knew in Provo scattered and gone and maybe in the ground. She wonders if, when Gary goes, they would "all descend another step into that pit where they gave up searching for one another." She has no sense of "how much was her fault, and how much was the fault of the ongoing world that ground along like iron-banded wagon wheels in the prairie grass." When I read this, I remembered that the tracks made by the wagon wheels are still visible from the air over Utah, like the footprints made on the moon. This is an absolutely astonishing book. (p. 27)