A review by gengelcox
The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing by Norman Mailer

informative reflective slow-paced

3.0

I’ve never read any of Norman Mailer’s fiction, so it might seem strange for me to pick up his book on writing without being familiar with his own. I am, however, an aficionado of books on writing, which I tend to read while in the midst of a big writing project just in case something there can provide an additional spur to my creativity.

Mailer’s style and interests, however, are pretty antithetical to my own, somewhat in the same way the subjects and themes of my MFA colleagues never quite jibed with my sensibilities. I don’t mean this in a disparaging way. There’s room for all types of writing in the world and what is considered successful, profitable, meaningful, and important depends on the audience and what they are looking for from reading. The jokes write themselves about things like how Oprah’s Book Club seemed to be more like This Month’s Adultery and I’m amazed at the longevity and recurrence of so many works by and about middle-class academics having affairs with their co-ed students (yes, I’m looking at you, Chabon). Although Mailer’s depiction of the lives of WWII soldiers in The Naked and the Dead established him as a major writer, most of his later work focused on love (or sex) rather than war. His personal life and loves also became as much an issue over his career, although not as much as contemporaries like Truman Capote, whose choice to make it so Mailer describes with something bordering on glee. 

Mailer tries to make the case that he, and his contemporaries, were the last of the serious novelists. That the rise and ubiquity of movies and TV and other entertainments spelled doom for novels, by creating an audience that expected easy, nice stories, rather than depictions of ugliness, brutality, and other things Mailer considered important to write about. I think he doth protest too much, or at least was incredibly short-sighted. Not only do I think such novels can still be written and find an audience, I believe both TV and movies can provide the same experience, albeit different in format and method, but still effective. 

I read, and write, for other purposes. Not solely for entertainment, although I appreciate a story that moves you along and keeps your interest, but something akin to discovery: the frisson of finally understanding something about the world or yourself that you didn’t grasp before. I personally rarely find this in so-called “mainstream” fiction (or serious novels, in Mailer’s parlance), although occasionally a book of this type does move me (A.S. Byatt’s Possession, Richard Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations, and Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres all come to mind immediately). Because of my interest in the progress of science and increasing cross-cultural exchange, I find the metaphorical possibilities inherent in genre fiction more appealing. Of course, one could simply resolve this with Sturgeon’s dictum that 90% (or 95% or 99%, depending on how harsh a critic you want to be) is crap, and that counts for all manner of novels, serious and otherwise.

I found myself skimming this book as I moved into the latter third, where Mailer starts expounding on his personal philosophy rather than rehashing his printing history and the choices he made along the way, which I did find somewhat illuminating, although I doubt any of it will end up applicable for my own writing or career. I suspect this book would be of much more interest to people who have read Mailer and liked what he tried to do, and I would hesitate to recommend it to a beginning writer (which, to be honest, Mailer also makes clear early on—that this is not a book about grammar or style or writing instruction, but about the elements of the writing life and career after all those things have been taken care of).