The Time of Our Time (Modern Library Paperbacks) - Softcover

Mailer, Norman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375754911 ISBN 13: 9780375754913

Publisher: Modern Library, 1999

Synopsis

Norman Mailer's The Time of Our Time is a giant retrospective, a rich, boisterous portrait of our times seen through the fiction and reportage of one of America's greatest writers.

Mailer selected and edited the contents of this work to create an ongoing narrative of events large and small that have shaped America over the last fifty years.  Included are passages from The Naked and the Dead, The Deer Park, An American Dream, The Armies of the Night, The Executioner's Song, Ancient Evenings, and Harlot's Ghost as well as portraits of Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Lee Harvey Oswald, Madonna, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and Richard Nixon as they appeared in some of his best magazine pieces.  How readable is the result!  It is as if one is being drawn into a fabulous novel with extraordinary characters, real and fictional, who appear and reappear through the years until a vast mural of America as a nation comes into focus, full of follies and blunders, surprisingly elegant and often crazy--tragic in its losses and large in its triumphs.

On display here are Mailer's enormous energies, his vast curiosity, and his powers of delineation.  Here too are his errors of judgment and deed, both personal and literary.  As a writer, Mailer eschews all limits.  He goes at the world like a tiger.  What will surprise many readers of The Time of Our Time is what a shrewd and stylish tiger he has been.


From the Hardcover edition.

About this title

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 as a rifleman 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 The Armies of the Night and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize again in 1980 for The Executioner's Song.

He has directed four feature-length films, was co-founder of The Village Voice in 1955, ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York in 1969, and was president of the American PEN from 1984 to 1986.


From the Hardcover edition.

From the Back Cover

A giant retrospective: selections by the author of his best work--including new material for the paperback edition--
ingeniously arranged to tell the story of the past half-century

"[It] is that rarity, an anthology that can be read straight through. Its neatly interwoven sections collectively tell a story of their own, a social history of postwar America, at the heart of which is Mailer's own tangled love affair with this country."
--James Shapiro, The New York Times Book Review

"One of the anthology's more remarkable effects is to make us forget which realm we are in--nonfiction or fiction, reality or fantasy--or why any of these categories matter. . . . In Mailer's retelling of it, the recent history of the country becomes largely its secret history; assassination plots and love affairs move the levers of reality. As readers, we happily enter a long, long night in which movie stars, Presidents, intelligence operatives, and gangsters meet in the ideal Mailer after-hours spot where only grown-ups are allowed to gather and where the music is always insinuating and sweet. The book becomes, willy-nilly, a kind of erotic commingling of these big players."
--David Denby, The New Yorker

"A unique, and very useful, work, and certainly the best possible introduction to one of the most prodigious careers in modern American letters."
--Kirkus Reviews

"An often mesmerizing attempt to reflect the times through the distorting mirror of the writer's own intense preoccupation during the 50 years since his first novel. . . . No observer has had a keener instinct for the essences of politicians' characters or for the textures of celebrated and marginal American lives, and no contemporary American writer has been less willing to say only what it is safe to say."
--Entertainment Weekly

Norman Mailer was born in 1923 and published his first book, The Naked and the Dead, in 1948. The Armies of the Night won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1969; Mailer received a second Pulitzer in 1980 for The Executioner's Song. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Brooklyn, New York.


"No contemporary writer could match the book's variety, its manic energy,
its spiritual violence and striving."--David Denby, The New Yorker

From the Inside Flap

r's The Time of Our Time is a giant retrospective, a rich, boisterous portrait of our times seen through the fiction and reportage of one of America's greatest writers.

Mailer selected and edited the contents of this work to create an ongoing narrative of events large and small that have shaped America over the last fifty years. Included are passages from The Naked and the Dead, The Deer Park, An American Dream, The Armies of the Night, The Executioner's Song, Ancient Evenings, and Harlot's Ghost as well as portraits of Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Truman Capote, JFK, Marilyn Monroe, Lee Harvey Oswald, Madonna, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and Richard Nixon as they appeared in some of his best magazine pieces. How readable is the result! It is as if one is being drawn into a fabulous novel with extraordinary characters, real and fictional, who appear and reappear through the years until a vast mural of America as a nation comes into focus,

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

In the late thirties, there used to be any number of dirty jokes circulating about Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor, but they worked their way out of the side of one's mouth.

It was the time, after all, of eight-page cartoon books featuring Popeye and his King Kong prong, or Olive Oyl having one on the house (or the horse).

Now, in the years of Bill Clinton, the jokes are on the Internet or come to you by e-mail: "How is Clinton different from the Titanic?" "Why, only 240 women went down on the Titanic." Monica Lewinsky told a friend: "You could say I earned my presidential knee-pads."

In America, the mood is almost gay. A trifle nauseated, but gay, like a rough trip on an amusement ride. Once again, the American spirit is investing in a matter about which few knew anything, yet the ignorant were certain they would keep being rewarded. . .

Yes, Hillary has suffered humiliations on a scale few women in history can match. Yet, there it is. She comes out early on the morning of Bill's State of the Union speech and defends her man with fury, conviction, and purpose. He--like O. J. Simpson--is "100 percent not guilty." Her man is not guilty. Hillary is on the way to becoming a legend. How many millions of wives in America are now obliged to say to themselves: Could I ever defend my guy like that? Hillary is wonderful.

Hillary is wonderful. She not only defends, she attacks. She speaks of a right-wing conspiracy to destroy her husband. It satisfies our deep need in America to find a new conspiracy every year.

What powerful instincts are in Hillary. The first lady's features, when studied, are remarkable. On the brow and mouth of very few women is written so vast and huge a desire for power. Of course, she is loyal to her Bill, loyal certainly by her good side, but even more loyal out of darker and more powerful urges. For if she remains loyal to him she will yet become a legend in America, and that is necessary to satisfy what may be her true aim--to become the first woman elected president of the United States.

If Al Gore should win and have two terms, then the year is 2008. Should Gore not win in the year 2000, then 2004 is her moment. The price is to be loyal to a man she might prefer to brain with a brick. She must know the old Italian saying: "Revenge is a dish that people of taste eat cold." How much better to wait and put him in a position of being First Man. Bill will not feel comfortable to find himself in Denis Thatcher's old slot. . .

Under Clinton, the rich got vastly richer. All the while, on his spiritual saxophone, Clinton played tender resonant ballads for blacks and women. Some of them even got high-end jobs. It was gilt-edged tokenism. Measured as a Democrat, however, who might retain some real social purpose, he was a dork and a nerd.

On the other hand, but for the possible exception of Hillary, he was the most powerful Clintonite in the country; he was, indeed, a mighty lion of a Clintonite--he was his own most important and powerful project. That is true of more than a few of us. The crucial difference here is that Clinton is most mighty as a lion when his favorite project, himself, is threatened. He is at his best when wounded. How many can say that? Yes, he certainly comes through when it is a matter of projecting for one dramatic night what a wonderful all-seeing, all-doing American president he is. . .

Does it matter that now it is a younger woman under the media gun and he is now commander in chief? The great question merely deepens: How can he, Bill Clinton, endanger his presidency so? Of course, men take weird chances when the navigator at the center of oneself whispers in the dream: Kid, your cancer is near.

For some, the cure for cancer is to visit the moon of moral peril. If the cause of cancer is undissolved shame, and cancer is a revolt of the cells against the hegemony of the CEO (that mysterious Chief Ego Officer who runs the body), then it may be that Clinton is full of undissolved shame. Let us warrant that it is not because of oral sex.

His shame, if he has any, is that he has never been able to stand up to the big money. He is powerless before men of huge financial size. Face to face with such buckos, the wind dies and the proud flag on the flagship commences to droop. As Monica Lewinsky is to Bill Clinton, so is Clinton to the big money--just a kid trying to earn his presidential knee-pads.

If it all comes to the worst for him and he is obliged to resign, a denouement which seems unlikely at this writing, well, an old moral law will have been observed: The criminal is rarely condemned for his true crime.

Nixon's sins in Watergate were venial compared to the monstrosity of allowing the war in Vietnam to wind down over four years while two million more Asian men and women were killed. Clinton's major crime is not that he has charged relations of one sort or another in the White House (that palace of presidential purity!) with a young girl, but that he betrayed the poor and enriched the wealthy. As a churchgoer, he ought to know that the gates of heaven are not always open if you approach with that little blemish on the record.

"Lord," prayed Augustine, "make me pure, but not yet."

--From The Observer of London (August 2, 1998)

Edition details

• Publisher: Modern Library
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375754911
• ISBN 13: 9780375754913
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 1328