The Time of Our Time - Softcover

Norman Mailer

3.86

114 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0349112002 ISBN 13: 9780349112008

Publisher: Abacus, 1999

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THE TIME OF OUR TIME is a selection of Mailer's best work, chosen by Mailer himself, and ingeniously arranged as a literary retrospective. It is a masterly, boisterous portrait of our times, seen through the fiction and reportage of a great writer. Included are passages from THE NAKED AND THE DEAD, THE ARMIES OF THE NIGHT and THE EXECUTIONER'S SONG, as well as many of his other works and his best-known magazine pieces from Marilyn Monroe to Madonna. This giant omnibus is a testament to Mailer's enormous energies, his vast curiosity, and his amazing talent and amounts almost to a self-chosen literary 'autobiography'.

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Review:

Compiling an anthology of one's own work can be a tricky business. Norman Mailer, of course, first committed this act of literary cannibalism back in 1959, when he assembled a brilliant collage of stories, journalism, essays, and poetry, Advertisements for Myself . Now, 50 years after the publication of his first novel, Gore Vidal's favorite sparring partner has put together another, more massive anthology, advertising not only himself but what we might call (paraphrasing Frost) his lover's quarrel with American life. "Over the course of years," Mailer writes in his foreword, "most of us compose in the privacy of our minds a social and cultural history of the years through which we have passed." True enough. But Mailer's history of the American Imperium has always been public--extremely public--and in The Time of Our Time he attempts to get it all into a single book.

Surely this sense of himself as the republic's recording angel accounts for the structure of Mailer's anthology: rather than arranging the excerpts by date of composition, he groups them by the historical era they describe. His 1963 polemic about the Bay of Pigs, for example, appears alongside his cloak-and-dagger reconstruction of the same event from Harlot's Ghost (1991). Fiction and fact lie cheek-by-jowl and eventually become impossible to tell apart. Here is the fulfillment of a project that Mailer began decades ago with such cunning hybrids as Armies of the Night. Yet this enormous volume shouldn't be read merely as a hand-tooled work of history. It is also the record of a phenomenal literary career, documenting Mailer's initial triumphs, his adrenaline-infused masterpieces of the late 1960s, hyperbolic stinkers like Marilyn and Ancient Evenings, and the astringent sorrow and awe of The Executioner's Song, which marked his return to form in 1979 after a long fallow period. Who but this loudmouthed, elegant, shrewd, and invariably excessive author would claim that his time--i.e., his accounting of it--is essentially our time? And who else could even begin to make such a claim stick? The list is a short one indeed.

From the Back Cover:

A giant retrospective: selections by the author of his best work--including new material for the paperback edition--
ingeniously arranged to tell the story of the past half-century

"[It] is that rarity, an anthology that can be read straight through. Its neatly interwoven sections collectively tell a story of their own, a social history of postwar America, at the heart of which is Mailer's own tangled love affair with this country."
--James Shapiro, The New York Times Book Review

"One of the anthology's more remarkable effects is to make us forget which realm we are in--nonfiction or fiction, reality or fantasy--or why any of these categories matter. . . . In Mailer's retelling of it, the recent history of the country becomes largely its secret history; assassination plots and love affairs move the levers of reality. As readers, we happily enter a long, long night in which movie stars, Presidents, intelligence operatives, and gangsters meet in the ideal Mailer after-hours spot where only grown-ups are allowed to gather and where the music is always insinuating and sweet. The book becomes, willy-nilly, a kind of erotic commingling of these big players."
--David Denby, The New Yorker

"A unique, and very useful, work, and certainly the best possible introduction to one of the most prodigious careers in modern American letters."
--Kirkus Reviews

"An often mesmerizing attempt to reflect the times through the distorting mirror of the writer's own intense preoccupation during the 50 years since his first novel. . . . No observer has had a keener instinct for the essences of politicians' characters or for the textures of celebrated and marginal American lives, and no contemporary American writer has been less willing to say only what it is safe to say."
--Entertainment Weekly

Norman Mailer was born in 1923 and published his first book, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948. The Armies of the Night won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1969; Mailer received a second Pulitzer in 1980 for The Executioner's Song. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Brooklyn, New York.
"No contemporary writer could match the book's variety, its manic energy,
its spiritual violence and striving."--David Denby, The New Yorker

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