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PaperclipPerfector  18hr ago (text post)   464 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 12, 2025

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I just finished The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer. And I didn't like it. It was well enough written mechanically, and at times the plot threatened to be good but relented before arrival. It was too weird and contrived, too much effort put into elaborate personal backstories for characters I never quite care about. It never quite managed to get there. Maybe it's a Seinfeld Isn't Funny thing where some of the edginess is just boring to me, but was cool in 1950?

But I realized midway through that Norman Mailer occupies a unique place in literature for me. I don't like him, but I consistently confuse him for an author I like. I've bought several books of his when browsing used book sales, his biography of Picasso, TNATD, his book about the Rumble in the Jungle, I think a couple others over the years. The only one I even marginally liked was the boxing book. But I keep buying them thinking I like Norman Mailer. He's constantly mentioned in the same sentences as authors I like ("Manly man authors like Hemingway and Mailer", "Hard boiled gonzo journalists like Thompson and Mailer") or by authors I like (Eldridge Cleaver calls him out as a great author in Soul on Ice and Alex Perez loves him). But when I tried to think of things of Mailer's that I like I realized I was getting him confused with Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) or Carver or Updike or Gardner. Every story I could think of that I liked about Mailer, even the personal details, I had confused with somebody else.

Does anyone else have somebody like that? An artist who you don't like, but who you repeatedly forget that you dislike and vaguely think you like because it seems like something you'd like.

Look forward to me posting this again in five years when I pick up a copy of The Executioner's Song that I find in an AirBnB and slog through it in a weekend only to remember I hate it.

My sister has several books by Jeff VanderMeer, and I've borrowed and/or read-while-visiting multiple times, and always regretted it. I think my most recent encounter, with the story "The Third Bear", crystallized for me the idea that I really don't enjoy the way basically every character in a VanderMeer story is guaranteed some sort of horrible fate, and I hope to start actually remembering this going forward.

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