The Executioner's Song is a "plain, unvarnished tale," stitched together from hundreds of hours of interviews, about half of them conducted by Mailer, with supporting characters and bit players in the Gary Gilmore saga. The story is told from several dozen points of view….

Mixing the different voices proved to be Mailer's highest hurdle. "I was brought up not to jump from one person's mind into another," he says. "I thought that was what poor writers did when they didn't have enough imagination to find a form. But then, I thought, the shifting point of view was a 19th-century form, it went back to a time when people believed in God and the novelist could play at being the All Knowing Supreme Deity."

In this case, the deity orchestrates the voices, but does not join in the song. The qualities (or flaws, depending on one's point of view) we look for in Mailer's work—the ripe style, the existential musings, the outrageous ideas, the over-characterizing—are nowhere in sight.

What then, one might ask, is there of Mailer in the book, and why could it not have been written by any competent journalist who knows how to edit taped interviews? Mailer insists that "only someone who has been writing for 30 years would be willing to relinquish his ego. I couldn't have done it 15 years ago. It's hard for a writer who takes himself seriously to be nothing but a transmission belt."

But there is more to it than not getting in the way of his material. Mailer saw in Gilmore a character that he might have invented in a novel, for Gilmore personified the main theme of his entire oeuvre—namely, that the soul could conceivably have a separate existence from the body. Gilmore believed so fervently in an afterlife that he worried about bumping into his murder victims. Mailer wanted to show that Gilmore's wish to die was not a put-on or a publicity stunt; he wasn't just a proud con trapped in a role. He was doing it because he felt he deserved to die, could no longer tolerate life in prison, where he had spent half of his 35 years, and wanted to reach the Other Side. That was the kind of existential gamble Mailer could appreciate. (p. 57)

[The Executioner's Song] is Mailer's best book since The Deer Park, which may be a backhanded compliment in light of the author's unprecedented restraint. My first thought was, "How in the world can Gary Gilmore be worth a thousand pages?" But I found myself swept up and carried along by the narrative, and I began to see now artful the design is—how, by letting the characters speak in their own voices, and by having the events unfold as they appeared to witnesses, Mailer achieves an effect that is not unlike the homespun credibility of Thornton Wilder's Our Town But this is the underside of Our Town, dealing as it does with misfits and murders. The overall tone made me think of Conrad's remark in Lord Jim concerning "that mysterious, almost miraculous, power of producing striking effects by means impossible of detection, which is the last word of the highest art."

This book is much more than the story of a man who wanted to die. It is a panorama of American life in the Seventies, of people at every level of society responding to an extreme situation….

Mailer devotes one-third of his book to the transformation of a criminal case in Utah into a national media event, the shift from the saving of Gary Gilmore to the merchandising of Gary Gilmore. The man and his bizarre crusade were overshadowed by the deal—the movie and TV rights, the articles and interviews, and the foreign sales, which Larry Schiller kept hustling.

One end-product of this merchandising is Mailer's book, which redeems itself from the accusation of cheap (no, make that expensive) checkbook journalism by showing how the press distorts, makes over, and becomes a part of the event. Gilmore began to like the part and to play up to it, striking poses, chuckling over his mail, and enjoying the attention. Eventually, he got his way, and was shot by a firing squad early in 1977. The book is strewn with clues to explain his behavior, but it ends without a pat, predigested, conclusive answer….

The point Mailer makes is that even when we know everything about another human being we can never understand his ultimate moral nature. "I put in all I knew," he says, "and I have the answers we have in life, not hard concrete answers, but that Gilmore was a deck of cards, as many of us are. Perhaps he killed because he knew that what was best in him could never be expressed." (p. 58)