Tough Guys Don't Dance: A Novel - Hardcover

Mailer, Norman

3.51

3,269 ratings by Goodreads

9780375508745: Tough Guys Don't Dance: A Novel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375508740 ISBN 13: 9780375508745

Publisher: Random House, 2002

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A dark, brilliant novel of astonishing pitch, set in Provincetown, a “spit of shrub and dune” captured here in the rawness and melancholy of the off-season, Tough Guys Don’t Dance is the story of Tim Madden, an unsuccessful writer addicted to bourbon, cigarettes, and blonde, careless women with money. On the twenty-fourth morning after the decampment of his wife, Patty Lareine, he awakens with a hangover, considerable sexual excitement, and, on his upper arm, a red tattoo bearing a name from the past. Of the night before, he remembers practically nothing. What he soon learns is that the front passenger seat of his Porsche is soaked with blood and that in a secluded corner of his marijuana stash in a nearby woods rests a blonde head, severed at the throat.
Is Madden therefore a murderer? He has no way of knowing. As in many novels of crime, the narrative centers on violence—physical, sexual, and emotional—but these elements move in their orbits through a rich constellation of character as Madden tries to reconstruct the missing hours of a terrible evening. In the course of this in-quiry a bizarre and vividly etched gallery of characters reappears to him as in a dream—ex-prizefighters, sexual junkies, mediums, former cons, a police chief, a world-weary former girl friend, and Mad-den’s father, old now but still a Herculean figure, a practitioner of the sternest backroom ethics.
Tough Guys Don’t Dance represents Mailer at the peak of his powers with a stunningly conceived novel that soon transcends its origins as a mystery to become a relentless search into the recesses and buried virtues of the modern American male. Rarely, as many readers will discern, have the paradoxes of machismo and homosexuality been so well explored.

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About the Author:

Norman Mailer was born in 1923 in Long Branch, New Jersey, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from Harvard, he served in the South Pacific during World War II. He published his first book, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948. Mailer won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for Armies of the Night, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize again in 1980 for RThe Executioner's Song. He has directed four feature-length films, was a co-founder of The Village Voice in 1955, and was president of the American PEN from 1984 to 1986. His most recent novel, The Gospel According to the Son, is his thirtieth book. The Time of Our Time, an anthology of the best of Mailer's writing, was published in Mqy of 1998 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversery of Mailer's literary debut.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

Review:

** 'Hypnotic...thrilling. MAIL ON SUNDAY ** 'Mailer writes like an angel- a master of small surprises that may be precursors of seismic shocks. LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS, CHICAGO TRIBUNE ** 'Think of it as a novel by Dashiell Hammett and transpose it into Mailer's style. NEW YORK TIMES

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