Modest Gifts : Poems and Drawings

Rating:
Summary: God Bless Norman Mailer
Review: After all these years some humble pie. Some of this is yet still too sour for our friends in Haters Review Row. Too bad. Norman Mailer is one of the greatest writers of our time, whether you like him or not. If you don't like him, don't waste your time "reviewing" his work, just go away and leave us alone, we don't need any more of your whining. This book gave me a lot of little laughs, and some "modest gifts" of insightful and not-so-great "poems" or "prose-snippets", whatever you would like to call them. It was a fun release from the more arduous "Of a Fire On the Moon" which I am currently reading. I just finished The Prisoner of Sex, written by Mailer in 1970-- quite an interesting take on the "Women's Lib" movement at that time-- a bit heady, but with other equipment as well (!) God Bless Norman Mailer, one of the last great American authors.

Rating:
Summary: God Bless Norman Mailer
Review: After all these years some humble pie. Some of this is yet still too sour for our friends in Haters Review Row. Too bad. Norman Mailer is one of the greatest writers of our time, whether you like him or not. If you don't like him, don't waste your time "reviewing" his work, just go away and leave us alone, we don't need any more of your whining. This book gave me a lot of little laughs, and some "modest gifts" of insightful and not-so-great "poems" or "prose-snippets", whatever you would like to call them. It was a fun release from the more arduous "Of a Fire On the Moon" which I am currently reading. I just finished The Prisoner of Sex, written by Mailer in 1970-- quite an interesting take on the "Women's Lib" movement at that time-- a bit heady, but with other equipment as well (!) God Bless Norman Mailer, one of the last great American authors.

Rating:
Summary: an irrelevant author
Review: i don't know why mailer is a literary icon. calling his novels boring and pedantic would be an understatement. this book is just a lot of senile doodling from a writer who has outlived his relevancy. i don't know of anyone who likes mailer's books. they don't get taught in schools anymore, and perhaps that speaks volumes about the durability of his creative vision. this meandering brain-fart of a book, like harlot's ghost, will not stand the test of time. i guess it's time to say goodbye to an icon, who, in all honesty, was never much of a writer to begin with.

Rating:
Summary: an irrelevant author
Review: i don't know why mailer is a literary icon. calling his novels boring and pedantic would be an understatement. this book is just a lot of senile doodling from a writer who has outlived his relevancy. i don't know of anyone who likes mailer's books. they don't get taught in schools anymore, and perhaps that speaks volumes about the durability of his creative vision. this meandering brain-fart of a book, like harlot's ghost, will not stand the test of time. i guess it's time to say goodbye to an icon, who, in all honesty, was never much of a writer to begin with.

Rating:
Summary: Mailer's Genius is Not On Display with Poetry Re-Issue
Review: I, like many, think that Mailer ought to win the Nobel Prize for literature for the sheer genius of his published over his fifty plus years as a writer. Few of his generation, or in generations following, have have the kind of profound successes in fiction, reportage, cultural criticism, and political essay.

Mailer has dared what other literary writers only feigned and actively engaged the world in ways and manners that he thought would make reality surrender some of its secrets. The hope, of course, would be that he might be able to change the way men and women viewed themselves in a political reality that had stripped the individual of all creative drive, and hence empower them to change the substance of their world. Grand ambition, yes, and a failed enterprise,but in the attempt are left a string of brilliant books -- "The Naked and the Dead", "The Executioner's Song", "Why are We In Viet Nam", "Armies of the Night", "An American Dream", "Harlot's Ghost",-- that, among others, form a body of work at once daring,daunting, vain and arrogant, preening, breathtakingly on target, raunchy , clipped, rich and rolling and lyrical like the grandest music. An infuriating writer, yes, but even so one who's work stands tall in the era in which he wrote.

This, though, isn't one of those books," Modest Gifts" being, at best, a gussied up reissue of a lone book of verse he produced in the early Sixties,"Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Diasters)".

Now, as then, the pieces are slight, skeletal, un-propelled by anything resembling a notion that the reader cares about. For a writer who's composed some of the richest prose and lyric flights this side of Faulkner and DeLillo, these efforts are so minimal that even a verbal skinflint like Hemingway would call these gifts not modest ,but cheap. Mailer explains interestingly that these were put together at a bad time in his life when he could not compose--stabbing your wife will tend to
dampen your willingness to wax--and that he found something therapeutic in their existence, but there never has been a compelling reason for these things to be put between covers and sold. Unlike some, I think that a great writer's less great work, the unformed work, the jottings, the juvenilia,the notebooks, the scraps and orts, need to remain in the drawer, and not committed to the judgment of history. This poetry is so minimal that it can't even raise a stink.