One week put Norman Mailer on three best-of lists that could hardly be further apart, and the distance between them is the point.
In The Week, film critic and historian David Thomson — whose new A Sudden Flicker of Light argues that cinema has in fact been a damaging cultural force — chose his “best books” about the movies. Alongside Nathanael West, Fitzgerald, and Lillian Ross, he names The Deer Park (1955): “still the best novel about love, lust, identity, money, honor, power, producers, and actors.” Mailer’s Hollywood roman à clef, set against the pleasure ground of Palm Springs, follows a war hero who toys with selling his life story to the movies.
Over at Collider, Luc Haasbroek ranked “The Best Military Thriller Books of All Time” and placed The Naked and the Dead (1948) at number five — “a more literary take on the military thriller, elevated by master craftsman Norman Mailer,” and “a remarkably human portrait of warfare, one that avoids simplistic heroism while also never diminishing the courage of the fighters.”
And at Women.com, Emily Hutchinson ranked the “Pulitzer Prize–Winning Novels From the ’80s” by reader reviews and set The Executioner’s Song (1979) third of ten — reviving the old quarrel over whether Mailer’s account of the killer Gary Gilmore belonged in the fiction category at all. His answer has aged as well as the book: “Nonfiction provides answers and fiction illumines questions. I think my book does the latter.”
A Hollywood novel, a war novel, and a true-crime epic; a film historian’s shelf, a genre countdown, and a reader-reviewed ranking. Seventy-odd years on, the same writer lands on all three without strain — the back lot at Desert D’Or, the platoon on Anopopei, and the Utah death house where Gary Gilmore waited to be shot turning out to be three surveys of the same ground: power, and what it does to the men who want it.