Writing as a guest on Jacobin’s Substack, Christian Lorentzen, formerly the book critic for New York magazine, looks at how reputations rise and fall after a writer dies. He calls the piece “The Afterlives of Literary Reputation,” and his main example is Norman Mailer.
Lorentzen goes back to January 2022, when Michael Wolff reported in The Ankler that Random House had dropped a new Mailer collection because a junior staffer objected to “The White Negro.” The Society followed that story closely at the time. Within a day, the New York Times set the record straight: Random House had declined to make an offer, nothing had been canceled, and Skyhorse had already acquired the book, which appeared the next year as The Mysterious Country. Random House still keeps Mailer’s backlist in print, “The White Negro” included. Lorentzen concludes that the “cancellation” “has the feeling of a false flag operation,” and he notes that it got Mailer more attention than any of the major Mailer books published between 2010 and 2018.
The argument matters more than the story of the scandal. Lorentzen takes Darryl Pinckney’s essay in The Nation seriously, then pushes back on its claim that the offended now rule the culture. A writer’s biography and politics, he argues, don’t decide whether people keep reading the work. Its literary qualities do. Critics have always found ways to read past a writer’s feuds and reactionary views, and the books usually outlast whatever the writer did. Readers who can’t forgive the stabbing of Adele Morales, the fight with Gore Vidal, or the Abbott parole don’t need permission to skip Mailer. As Lorentzen puts it, “Nobody ever needs an excuse not to read a book.” But skipping a writer is a private choice. It is not a verdict on the work.
Members who lived through the winter of 2022 will remember the flood of commentary: Neal Pollack, David Klion, Michael Mailer, and many others. Nearly five years later, Lorentzen’s piece is a calmer account of the whole episode. Mailer’s place will be settled the way it always has been: by whether people keep picking up The Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song and finding something there.