Norman Mailer was known as much because of his very public life as for his tremendous penchant for writing as he lived: somewhat impulsively and haphazardly. It was in this headlong creative lurch that he became a staple of American culture, and not because he was, during every outing, the greatest writer alive (an honor he occasionally bestowed on others, most notably William S. Burroughs, another conspicuous Whole Person who left on an earlier train).

What must never be overlooked is that when Mailer was good, he was great. When he failed to achieve greatness he attracted vast, inglorious attention for having failed to live up to his own hype, and if he had a failing or a fatal strategy, it was his "Adverisements for Myself" -- an indulgence he paid for dearly.

Paying for mistakes was never a big deal for Mailer, however, who kicked open every door he chose to pass through and consquently went where most of us would only fantasize about going. He was, indeed the whole package.

I feel I have lost an impossibly talented, lunatic older brother and if I draw nothing else from Norman Mailer's life and death it will be that I'd better do what's on my "to do" list now.

As Mailer wrote in his defense notes for the obscenity trial of Burroughs' "Naked Lunch", in which Mailer praised Burroughs for having set down his trip "into hell," he said "...we are richer for that record and we are more impressive as a nation because a publisher can print that record and sell it in an open bookstore." Those words apply equally to Mailer's work: the good, the bad -- but never the indifferent.

I went to the New York Times web page this morning and read that novelist Norman Mailer had died at age 84, and to this moment I bow my head and seriously consider a major chapter in my own life closed. This hardly means that my book has ended, as Mailer's has, but it is true that Norman Mailer was the largest single influence in instilling the desire in me to write sentences that mean something large, important, and exciting. That desire was vanity, no doubt, but Mailer and the books he wrote-The Presidential Papers, An American Dream, Why Are We In Viet Nam, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Harlot's Ghost, The Executioner's Song, The Castle in the Forest among them-- were instrumental in getting me to pick up a pen and write away, transferring later to an Underwood 5, an IBM Selectric and various word processing programs afterward, all in the duty to speak truth to power as Mailer had, in metaphors of nuance, multiplied dualisms, rolling, Jamesian cadences mixed with the critical eye of a Mencken and the eroticized awareness of a Henry Miller.

Norman Mailer has had a radical trajectory through the course of his career, and then, at age 75 with fifty years as a professional writer behind him, a summary collection is the fashion, and The Time of Our Time is the door stopper through which posterity should judge either his ascension or decline in our literary Olympus. It's amazing, actually, how Mailer has controlled the course of criticism of his work, as he did with "Advertisements for Myself" and later with the Prisoner of Sex, both books through which his aesthetics were linked with a peculiarly Maileresque cosmology. There is much to argue with in The Prisoner of Sex, and though I'm in sympathy with the aims of the women’s movement, I cheer Mailer’s defense of the artists’ right to use their sexuality and sense of the sensual world as proper fodder for poetic expression. What makes the book important is precisely the fact that Mailer felt there was a need for a man to stand up and have a word against and about the rising tide of Feminist theory; while many male writers were too confused, adrift in daydreams of irony or bottled up rage, and while the academy was surrendering its arms without a shot being fired, Mailer spoke up and wrote that there was a profound and important difference between the sexes, and that while social justice must and will prevail regarding the rights of women in the work place and overall social sphere, one cannot maintain, straight faced, that the only difference between the sexes has to do with genitalia.

There are times when Mailer- the- mystic clogs up an otherwise lacerating argument, where his romanticism veers dangerously towards a lunatic’s hallucinations, but his defense of Miller, Lawrence and Genet against the clumsier moments of Millet's original critique in Sexual Politics is literary criticism at its most emphatic. The Prisoner of Sex is, I'm afraid, incoherent at times, but there are long passages of rich knock-out prose that demonstrate why Mailer is thought by many to be one of the premiere stylists of the times, and if nothing else, his lyrical defense of D.H.Lawrence is worth the purchase by itself. One might despise Mailer and his philosophy, but a critic was still trapped discussing the work through the author's obsessions. And that is the mark of brilliance, Mailer could get his readers to talk about things he wanted to speak to, because his language is strangely persuasive, at his high point, even as it addresses the dark and obscene corners of the imagination, and the baser instincts of American power.

It's difficult not to be impressed with the range of Mailer's topics in fiction, journalism, and essays! --World War 2 in the Pacific, Moon Landings, Black power, Women's Rights, Hunting, Reichian sexuality, the failure of Marxism, The Kennedy Assassination, Ancient Egypt, masculinity and American Literature, the dread of Modern architecture, the real meaning of the right wing, Boxing--and while Mailer at times seems breathless and throat clearing in his writing, that he's spreading a style too thin to cover the feeling that he is, for the moment, bereft of anything interesting to say, you note the way he changes tact, changes styles, and ushers in another period of solid books that stand as his strongest. The Time of Our Time provides an overly long reflection of a career that has been victim of the author's proclaimed desire to be the champ of his generation, but it also gives us a chance to appreciate a brilliant talent that found expression in spite of Mailer's self-annihilating quirks. Controversial, problematic, self-absorbed, but quintessentially American, he remains one of the best witnesses we could have had for the second half of the century.

Hardly a perfect writer, Norman Mailer was someone I called "our best writer" because he dared not to be retiring and falsely modest, and he wasn't afraid of taking risk or playing the fool. He had succeeded, Charles Heimler told me in conversation, in being "avant-garde and mainstream at the same time;” rigorously experimental, Mailer was a nineteenth century moralist who found his intellectual bearings in the High Modernism of the Fifties, who developed a sort of post-modern strategy of narrative quick change to keep his characters, situations, and core ideas alive, thriving, relevant. Mailer was oracular, a visionary, a mystic, a religious existential of his own design, but he was also one of the best observers of the American scene, a trenchant political reporter, a social pundit , a thoroughly devastating and subtle literary critic, a sublime and contentious commentator on painting, architecture, graffiti, theatre, movies. Novelist, essayist, film maker, journalist, Norman Mailer was someone you read, he was someone you listened to, someone you argued with and argued over with friends (or near friends); Norman Mailer was someone you paid attention to.