Martin McKenzie-Murray’s new piece in The Monthly, “Here’s piety in your eye”, uses Norman Mailer as a battering ram against the sanctimony of Australian literary culture — and lands more than a few blows.
The immediate occasion is Mailer’s 1997 novel The Gospel According to the Son, in which Mailer — characteristically undaunted — narrates the life of Jesus in the first person. The critical reception was about what you’d expect. Michiko Kakutani called it “silly, self-important and inadvertently comical.” James Wood was harsher still. Mailer, in response, punched the editor of The New Republic in the face. Of course he did.
But McKenzie-Murray’s real target isn’t Mailer at all. It’s the reflexive dismissal of difficult, risky, inconvenient writers by a literary culture that has confused moral hygiene with artistic seriousness. His argument: Australian letters has become a “plastic mausoleum” — comfortable, pious, and largely dead — where being A Good Person long ago crowded out the harder, messier work of being a good writer.
He’s right, and the diagnosis isn’t limited to Australia. The figure of the writer as ethical exemplar — expected to hold correct opinions, avoid uncomfortable territory, and signal virtue at every turn — is a recognizable trap on both sides of the Pacific. What gets lost is exactly what made Mailer worth reading even when he was wrong, which was often: the willingness to be humiliated in public pursuit of something true.
McKenzie-Murray quotes Luke Carman’s 2016 Meanjin essay, which apparently made exactly this argument a decade ago and was largely ignored — which proves the point neatly enough.
Worth your time.