Reaction to Mailer's "The Executioner's Song"

 My first remark is that this is a story so massive, with so many people involved and so many issues confronted, that for me the elements of the story became the main focus of my reading and the style of writing took a secondary role.  I was really more concerned with the characters than the author, which isn’t always the case.  I’ll still try and make some comments on both here.                    Parts 1 and 2: From the beginning the story is very descriptive, and on the surface seems objective.  Mailer isn't being very obvious about his judgment of the characters.  He is showing them in excruciating detail.  I can see the similarity between this story and Capote’s In Cold Blood.  The Executioner’s Song promises something else though, mainly; the inclusion of a desperate female character in Nicole, and Gary's potential for reform through the help of supportive people around him (or so it seems at the beginning).  Both of those elements are missing from ICB, aside from Dick's family who appear to be fairly normal.  The support that Gary receives seems to exceed what Dick and Perry were offered.  This makes the story a little more compelling, because the reader is wondering how things went wrong if there was help for Gary all along.  Nicole is chilling in her ambivalence and her responsibilities as a parent makes it worse.  She seems to exemplify the disregard for good judgment that Gary will eventually succumb to.   The style of the writing is interesting, with the use of concise paragraphs and open spaces between them.  Disconnecting the paragraphs makes it more important that each of them stand strongly on their own.  This might parallel a theme of the story, that moments which seem distinct and separate are actually pieces of the larger puzzle.  This could also have been an attempt at clearly emphasizing the style of dialogue which must have been a part of the action but couldn’t be accurately quoted.  It is unlikely that Gilmore generally used complex language, so Mailer must have wanted to present the action in the brief, simple style that was likely a part of the actual drama.

               Part 3: Gary and Nicole

In the afterword Mailer makes clear that Nicole ended up being the main source for much of the information portrayed in the book.  I found myself struggling with some of the sex scenes in Part 3, and just getting tired of hearing the intimate details of their devious relationship.  I was uncomfortable with Nicole’s habitual promiscuity, to the point where she seemed as disgusting a person to me as Gilmore.  The accuracy of how events progressed in time becomes critical in this section, as Mailer explains in the afterword, for understanding Gilmore’s motives. 

The pacing and structure are imaginative and laced with realism; for example, a paragraph of only two sentences, where Gilmore and Toni pass each other in the kitchen and look at each other.  Nothing happens but a glance, but the singling out and positioning of that moment create an intense mood.  When a reader is asked to deeply concentrate on something as trivial as a look, the author is also demanding an elevated responsibility to concentrate on other more dramatic events.  

Nicole’s life story, though shorter than Gary’s, seems almost more dramatic.  Her attempts and failures at relationships, her willingness to give up, start over, relocate, and throw caution aside; all test the assumption that Gary is the focus of the book.  Does she seem to have a more innocent persona than Gilmore?  How did she avoid the need to commit criminal acts, when her motivations seem just as reckless as Gary’s, and her actions equally irresponsible?  What does this story say about gender?

                Start of Book 2: Interesting themes develop here, as Schiller and others position themselves at the center of Gary’s last days.  The Life-photographer turned movie producer is an interesting character, but I think knowing more about the "Helter Skelter" book and his involvement with the Manson case would make him easier to understand.  Of course his work ends up being the basis for this book.   Boaz is interesting and has the Tom Wolfe Kool-Aid vibe going on.  I’m surprised to see that culture carried over into the law schools at Berkeley.  His personality is almost likened to Gilmore’s, the way he was kind of floating around before he got turned onto this case.  The similarities between these characters, no matter how different their stations in life are, make their relationship compelling.  Boaz's talk of “synchronicity” kind of drives this home in a half-baked way.   My thoughts about the appeal boil down to this:  It seemed like Gary refusing his right to appeal is similar to the same way he refused responsibility to behave like a decent human being.  In the end he was a man who could not accept charity any easier than he could give it.   Gilmore seems so evil in the letters to Nicole; it makes you wonder why he was even allowed to communicate with her, since he obviously had a bad influence.  Mailer says some of the letters were redrawn to emphasize the mental impact Gilmore had on Nicole.  This seems like a fair ethical judgment on the part of the author.     The money being offered to Gary before his execution is shocking.  Someone who just committed a murder, in order to buy a cheap 200 dollar truck, is all of a sudden deciding which 50 thousand or 70 thousand dollar movie deal he wants to take.  It raises a question about the society that is so eager to learn about a killer, they will finance his last whims on earth in order to hear his point of view.  For me, this was the crux of Book 2; probing the motives of the press was as engrossing as looking at the mind of a killer.                  The Execution: The executioners that kill Gary end up getting a single paragraph of description.  Gary gets 1000 pages, they get about 40 words.  And yet terminally, they all committed the same basic act of violence.  I get the feeling Gilmore would have considered this an injustice, in some ironic way.   Mailer and Schiller made such an effort to capture the character of Gilmore the killer that I wonder why they didn’t tell the story of his executioners with the same effort.  If one of their objectives was to question the morality of the death penalty, to describe those who served it would have added to their cause.  However, their intentions don’t seem strongly for or against the punishment Gilmore received.   

Those final images of reporters scouring the scene of the execution seem to deprecate the media; as they finger bullet-holes in the chair and step in puddles of blood, I am left with the question which I wondered through most of Book 2: what do they hope to accomplish?