The Executioner's Song

Jul 13, 2011 Mariel rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: nothing like the sun

Recommended to Mariel by: invisible sun

Shelves: rubber-ring

Gary Gilmore's died in photographs are black and white. They are all mugshots. Gray faced still if they were to be in color mug shots of crimes of who knows what. Living or dead. Gray smirks and flat lines and nothing reaching the eyes because they are always somewhere else. Some live to get to heaven and another hopes it won't be as bad the next go around... Crimes to be and crimes of the soul. The photograph captions might say, "We always knew he'd be up to no good." The inside caption says, "...more

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Jul 11, 2010 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book is something. Yup, it surely is.

The Executioner's Song is one of those oxymoronically-named "non-fiction novels." In a non-fiction novel - the classic of the genre being Truman Capote's In Cold Blood - a journalist takes his research as far as humanly possible, right up to the boundary of unknown human thought, and then fills those gaps with reasoned speculation. It's kind of shady. Well, it's really shady, especially since it's never clear what is hard-fact and what is guesswork. Sha...more

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Mar 12, 2008 gaby rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: lovers of lovers, epics, convicts, murder, and the hollywood exploitation of it all

Shelves: crime, biography, nonfiction, new-journalism

I can't resist the deliciously apparent metaphor provided by the circumstance that it took me pretty much exactly from Christmas to Easter to read this epic, 1100 page book about the life and death of Gary Gilmore.

1100 pages! I've only read one longer book in my life, The Glass Bead Game, which was so good it took less than a week to read. Obviously, this book wasn't in the same league.

But it was much better than expected, since I'd otherwise been nursing a nascent hatred of Mailer initially sp...more I can't resist the deliciously apparent metaphor provided by the circumstance that it took me pretty much exactly from Christmas to Easter to read this epic, 1100 page book about the life and death of Gary Gilmore.

1100 pages! I've only read one longer book in my life, The Glass Bead Game, which was so good it took less than a week to read. Obviously, this book wasn't in the same league.

But it was much better than expected, since I'd otherwise been nursing a nascent hatred of Mailer initially spawned by my dissatisfaction with the wretched Armies of the Night. I figured I'd give him another shot though, I mean, people fucking worship Mailer. So, why not try the OTHER book he won a Pulitzer for?

And indeed, The Executioner's Song was well played and well deserving of that honor. The book is actually broken into two separate books - the first is, at its core, an intact and insulated lovestory set in rural Utah between a recently-sprung life-long convict and his new lady love. The first book never hints at a larger world -- it is a completely zoomed-in microcosm that never really roams farther than a couple of blocks of a single small town. There's a small cast, and the reader feels a sense of security in the smallness of the story, and the finite boundaries of its physical and emotional domains.

The second book is an instant and complete paradigm shift. It zooms out on the first paragraph from small-town Utah to the broader country and watches the firestorms that are set off when Gilmore refuses to appeal his death sentence after being tried for murders to which he admits. Extremely suddenly, the sense of nearly idyllic security provided by having just read 500 pages about 4 or 5 people in a single town is exploded by the introduction of all of the big-time journalists (Geraldo Rivera, Barbara Walters), politicians (the Supreme Court, the president), Hollywood producers (big names in the 70's, though lost on me today), and celebrities (when Johnny Cash calls, Gilmore says, "Is this the real Johnny Cash? Oh yeah? Well this is the real Gary Gilmore!") who swoop down into Provo, Utah, to capitalize on the sensationalism of capital punishment.

It was a nerdy delight to discover that much of the second book is really an exercise in the minutae of civil and criminal procedure in the federal courts, as Gilmore's lawyers wrangled with the ACLU and other civil rights groups for Gilmore's "right to die." Gilmore was the first person executed in the US after the Supreme Court issued and then rescinded a moratorium on the death penalty. As if the issue of capital punishment wasn't thorny enough in 1970's politics, Gilmore threw the wrench of WANTING to be executed, and of wanting the right NOT to appeal. From a legal standpoint, it was a mess of tangled and conflicting jurisprudence, and everyone from the local magistrate in Provo to the District Court to the Tenth Circuit to the Supreme Court weighed in - numerous times!

Through much of the first half, I figured this was Mailer's FUCK YOU to Capote for In Cold Blood. This was Mailer's response, and if you're going to take on In Cold Blood, it might as well be 1100 pages. But I was wrong. This book does a whole lot more - it encapsulates In Cold Blood, in a sense. It tells that story - a small town rocked by murders, and the boys who done it, and the execution. But Mailer tells the other story too, and it turns out to be just as compelling - the legal wrangling, the movie deals, the fancy New York lawyers who fly in with the contracts, the Hollywood bigwigs who move in for the kill (literally, into the TraveLodge by the prison).

In good conscience I can recommend this book without reservation. But, it IS 1100 pages........

And now, on to Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail. When will this "New Journalism" streak end?????(less)

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Apr 27, 2012 rachel rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: from-library, criminals-or-tremendous-creepers, this-is-america, 2012, social-justice, heartbreakers, wild-wild-west

There is a TED talk by Bryan Stevenson, about racial and class injustice in the prison system, that asks what I have come to realize is the hardest and most important question about capital punishment. It is not "does a guilty criminal deserve to die?" but "does the state have a right to kill?". This is a basic and obvious question, but it seems to take a backseat to the first question in discussions about the death penalty. The argument over capital punishment is as much or more gut driven as i...more There is a TED talk by Bryan Stevenson, about racial and class injustice in the prison system, that asks what I have come to realize is the hardest and most important question about capital punishment. It is not "does a guilty criminal deserve to die?" but "does the state have a right to kill?". This is a basic and obvious question, but it seems to take a backseat to the first question in discussions about the death penalty. The argument over capital punishment is as much or more gut driven as it is reasoned.

Having read this book, working for the government, seeing bureaucracy in motion, I have to say that I have little faith in the state's objectivity, its ability to decide a man's life. Many elements of the Gilmore execution are horrifying. And I used to be pro death penalty, before I read about it in practice, because I believe that people like Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, and Tiny Davis have perpetrated some true evil and should permanently lose their freedom. But, do we have the right to kill them -- as the anti-death penalty coalition in this book asks--to show that killing is wrong? I don't know. Anything but a "yes, absolutely" answer to that question is a working "no." it is too weighty an issue to say "eh...go ahead". As far as the justice served, I don't understand how killing someone (especially one, two, multiple years after the crime) is supposed to assuage anything for the victim's family.

So, the book. It's hopeless and profoundly depressing, not just in Gary's death but in the lives of its main characters. They are married and divorced way too young, sexually violated, mentally ill, chronically poor. For the first third of the book, Gary's let out of prison on robbery charges, goes to live with relatives who put faith in his rehabilitation and try to set him up with jobs and a place to live. Then he meets this girl, Nicole. She's something like 15 years younger than him. They have this obsessive, mostly sexual relationship and then she leaves him and he kills a couple people "to keep from killing [her].".

Then when he's on trial/in prison/waiting to die, she comes back and falls for him harder than ever. A great chunk of the book is the sexy, misspelled, uncannily teenage love letters they write back and forth. You see why it's such a marketable story, why media outlets competed hard for the rights to it.

Oh yeah -- a good portion of the book is about the media too. It is the least interesting part of the book, unless you like watching people with tragic lives get further exploited.

The Executioner's Song is a feat. It is not pleasant but it is an overlook to the way some people's real lives happen to work out, by luck, decision or both. Mailer's writing lacks that technicolor sensation of fictionalized accounts of real people; it is a long drive on a scenery free road on an overcast day, no neatly packaged endings with grand lessons learned but a fade away. Some exasperation.

I do wonder what Nicole Baker is up to today, how frequently she thinks of Gary still. She compels me, just as she compelled everyone else.(less)

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Mar 04, 2010 Jack added it · review of another edition

I should start out by admitting that I'm wary of inordinately long books. I decided that this, my first Mailer, had a reputation such that I would give it a shot.
Then, a few days ago, a sensation akin to exasperation and/or fatigue set in which I don't think related to the quality of Mailer's prose. I was on page 802, and had a moment of terrifying clarity in which it became real for me that I still had another 250 pages to go. Thereafter, I started to find it difficult to maintain the proper p...more I should start out by admitting that I'm wary of inordinately long books. I decided that this, my first Mailer, had a reputation such that I would give it a shot.
Then, a few days ago, a sensation akin to exasperation and/or fatigue set in which I don't think related to the quality of Mailer's prose. I was on page 802, and had a moment of terrifying clarity in which it became real for me that I still had another 250 pages to go. Thereafter, I started to find it difficult to maintain the proper perspective on precisely how well written this book is.

But I maintain that this book would be hard to evaluate anyway. The quality of the research is amazing, and with Gary Gilmore especially Mailer creates a wonderful literary portrait. Gilmore comes across as a psychopath, but still a human. Even when repulsed by Gilmore's motivations and actions, the reader can understand them. And although I personally never felt a great surge of sympathy for Gilmore, this portrait makes the second half of the book, when the media and the legal system engage in a truly nauseating liason to exploit Gilmore's pending execution, all the more effective. And here too, I felt like I understood the people involved even as their actions made me physically wince.

I couldn't shake the feeling though, that as mailer so meticulously reconstructs the pertinent actions and backgrounds of virtually EVERYBODY important to his subject, the discussion of Gilmore's victims felt kind of tacked on. He discusses their lives and the trauma to their families, but, for example, Gary's cousins and uncle both get more attention. In fairness, this disparity could well just be because Gilmore's side cooperated with Mailer on the book.

Similarly, I was a little disappointed that Gilmore's girlfriend Nicole - to whom Mailer devotes about as much attention as Gilmore and paints as compelling a portrait - just kind of disappears at the end. She spent much of the book seeming like a co-star in Mailer's story, and a very intriguing one, given that she WASN'T a heartless killer, but was in love with one. But after Gilmore's death, she just kind of disappears, nothwistanding some extremely sad omens that she's just going to continue her self destructive patterns. Some other material could have have been clipped, and these kind of issues addressed, to create a conclusion more consistent to the text without adding length.

All in all though, the book is remarkable simply because I'm not sure I've read anything quite like it. It's certainly reminiscent of In Cold Blood, but seeks out a more comprehensive effort to document everything about the time period between Gilmore's parole for one crime and his execution only nine months later. The breadth of subjects interviewed and the scope of the narrative is astonishing.(less)

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Jun 29, 2007 Ira rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Mailer dug into the world of Gary Gilmore and it's a none to happy place. He must have had just a plethora of access to this guy. This is Mailer's attempt to do the Capote non-fiction as narrative and he pulls it off. As stark and alarming as In Cold Blood is, Mailer's gift for the English language, his attention to detail, the length of the novel (it's a long one) and the subject matter make Executioner's Song the "classic of the this genre."

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Sep 02, 2007 Dave rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: readers who like to read about bad things happening to mediocre people

Boy was this a read, up there with prairyerth on shoe size. i felt if i didn't finish this extended case history of one man's journey through the court, parole and prison systems of america then mailer was going to punch my ears. once gilmore does the double deed and ends up in the pokey the yarn stretches a bit thin (much like THE ONION FIELD) with court details that start to veer into true crime territory. What keeps it interesting from start to finish is the relationship between Gary Gilmore...more Boy was this a read, up there with prairyerth on shoe size. i felt if i didn't finish this extended case history of one man's journey through the court, parole and prison systems of america then mailer was going to punch my ears. once gilmore does the double deed and ends up in the pokey the yarn stretches a bit thin (much like THE ONION FIELD) with court details that start to veer into true crime territory. What keeps it interesting from start to finish is the relationship between Gary Gilmore and the quite young Nicole (if i remember he was fifteen years her senior). Their love is a classic low-rent wild west tale with the 1970s in Utah as a backdrop. Nicole stays home with the kids (that were not Gilmores) and Gilmore steals snow skis, gets drunk and bugs the hell out of a auto dealer for a new truck he'll never be able to afford. Course once he gets the truck he's gotta have a way to pay for it, and lucky for one typewriter, Mailer's got him the tomb of a lifetime. One classic American tale of the west, lust, jealousy, the death penalty, and of course, Norman Mailer.

I dug up a VHS copy of the film adaptation at Odd Obsession video here in Chicago, and it's actually a made-for-tv film starring a young and very ambitiously corny Tommy Lee Jones in the role of Gilmore and an even younger, and very foxy Rosanna Arquette in the role of Nicole. I'm a sucker for old made-for-tv films, and this has all the classic elements: hubris, glimpses of nudity in bedrooms in which the moon is blue, quick pan shots of blood after a gunshot, swelling violins, country western score, occasional clarinet that caters to the emotions of the stock characters, and the dreaded "to be continued" when the going gets tough. Considering how long the damn book is, the film never felt rushed nor condensed.

Also of interest to those having read the book is Matthew Barney's Cremaster series (part II I believe) in which Barney plays Gary Gilmore in a rather chilly gas station scene. I saw a still of this movie hanging at the contemporary art museum the other day and from Mailer's word to Barney's tribute, Gilmore's journey is a continued reminder of American's fascination with people losing it over love.

(less)

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Apr 12, 2011 Darlene rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Full disclosure: I am not now nor have I ever been a proponent of the death penalty. There are some very good reasons it should be abolished.. least of which is that there is no evidence it serves as a deterrent to anyone other than the person being executed (for obvious reasons). This is the story of killer Gary Gilmore. In the summer of 1976, he robbed two men and then shot them both execution style. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to death in the state of Utah. What made this case so c...more Full disclosure: I am not now nor have I ever been a proponent of the death penalty. There are some very good reasons it should be abolished.. least of which is that there is no evidence it serves as a deterrent to anyone other than the person being executed (for obvious reasons). This is the story of killer Gary Gilmore. In the summer of 1976, he robbed two men and then shot them both execution style. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to death in the state of Utah. What made this case so controversial is the fact that Gilmore decided he did not want to wait and go through the endless appeals process. He wanted to be executed right away. Like most true crime books, this story takes you through the entire trial process and you get a behind the scenes look at how the criminal justice system of the United States works.. which isn't always logical and doesn't always seem fair. There are not many redeeming qualities to gary Gilmore's life. He was a career criminal who had been in and out of prison his entire life. As a matter of fact, he committed these crimes while on parole. At the same time, Mailer shows you how absolutely illogical this whole process can be.. not to mention the hypocrisy that was present in this case. Although Gilmore said he wanted to be executed right away and it would seem that the state would want to save the tax payers significant money by granting his wish, that is not what was done. The ACLU took up the case and began to fight appeals FOR him. Attorneys were concerned that perhaps Gilmore had a death wish and perhaps that made him insane so they proceeded to try to stop it for that reason.

Mailer's book went on for over 1,000 pages and truthfully he could have summed in up in far fewer pages. Having read other books by Mailer, I think this is just his style. Gilmore's story is very compelling and it also demonstrated the very mixed feelings of the people who are charged with carrying out these state sponsored murders. It also demonstrated how political this process really is and how the killer is often exploited by his own attorneys and other people in his life who want to use his story for profit and fame. All in all, a very sad but interesting story. Gary Gilmore was executed by the state of Utah on January 17, 1977. (less)

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Apr 07, 2008 Lindsay rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Jim

Ok so it's majorly long, but it's a true story and you get to know every tiny detail about what happened...and I can't believe how often I have heard other's refer to this story since then. If you've read Under the Banner of Heaven, you'd probably be interested in this one because there are some weird coincidences and even some of the same people are in the book.

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Feb 13, 2013 Myles Osborne rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

The best description I've read of this massive beast is "The White Trash War and Peace."

I'm glad to have experienced it's immense effect, but it's not Mailer beyond its bombastic scope. None of his distinct authorial voice appears. Instead, what we have is a thousand page exercise in free indirect style-- each segment is written to evoke the voice of its subject. As such, The Executioner's Song reads more like Raymond Carver than Norman Mailer. Of course, that's nothing to complain about. Pain u...more

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Jun 16, 2012 K.D. Oliveros rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to K.D. by: 501 Must Read Books; Pulitzer Winner in 1989

Shelves: 501, crime, non-fiction, prison-drama, long-read, pulitzer

Long read. 1,050 pages of history about the life and death of an American that was executed by firing squad in 1977 in Utah. This is Norman Mailer's answer to Truman Capote's In Cold Blood that was published in 1969 and started a new literary classification called non-fiction novels.

I read this with a lawyer as a reading buddy. We spent 14 days (1 day per part). Here is the discussion thread containing our daily thoughts. Sorry if some of the phrases are in Filipino.

Gary Mark Gilmore (1940-1977)...more

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Feb 25, 2008 John rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. One of my biggest failings as an otherwise liberal-leaning guy is that I'm not adamently anti death penalty. What can I say? Sure, the justice system is a bit screwey and unforgiving, and quasi-racist. But beyond the social factors, some criminals are simply vicious, hurtful, hateful bastards with violent tendancies no remorse, and IMHO, ain't nothing wrong with settling the score, cleaning the slate, tabula rasa or whatever.
So reading Norman Mailer's 1979 tome on the first state-sponsored exec...more One of my biggest failings as an otherwise liberal-leaning guy is that I'm not adamently anti death penalty. What can I say? Sure, the justice system is a bit screwey and unforgiving, and quasi-racist. But beyond the social factors, some criminals are simply vicious, hurtful, hateful bastards with violent tendancies no remorse, and IMHO, ain't nothing wrong with settling the score, cleaning the slate, tabula rasa or whatever.
So reading Norman Mailer's 1979 tome on the first state-sponsored execution carried out in the United States since the Supreme Court places a moratorium on the practice, in a book club with a bunch of NPR-listening, Slate-reading intellectuals who wouldn't even consider the possibility that capital punishment might, sometimes, in extreme instances, occaisonally be warranted - much less the idea that it should remain a fixture in our justice system - yeah, that can be pretty intense.
I'd like to hope that everybody in the group at least somewhat had their convictions challenged as much as I did.
Mailer cleverly divides the book into two halves: "Western Voices" focuses on the story of Gary Gilmore, a Colorado ex-con, his parole from prison, his alcoholism and petty theft leanings and sexual perversions, but also a side that was insanely intelligent, perceptive, sensitive and madly in love with Nicole Baker. (The Nancy to his Sid, if you will.) Mailer does not at all play down his central character's abusive, criminal, murderous failings. But the author gives as round of a picture as he possibly can (a taxing task, considering that Mailer did not pull from sources other than actual interviews for this novel, hellbent on making it "a true fiction" or whatever), in the end making us really sympathize and feel for this murderous guy, even if we don't really understand him and, nonetheless, want him to die.
Move onward to part two, "Eastern Voices," the point where the media from New York and Los Angeles and special interest causes like the NAACP and the ACLU rally to Gilmore's cause, insisting that he should not be put to death even though he accepts the guilty verdict and has no wishes to appeal. This segment of the book adds fuel to the fire of those who have leanings against mainstream broadcast media and activist cause opportunists, and I spent a lot of the section feeliing that the filmmakers and activists were all wrong, further that they were being offensively insistent in their wrongness, that Gilmore should just be allowed to accept his sentence if that's what he wanted. Mailer obviously wanted this reaction out of his readers, so he could then twist the knife in a totally different direction in an extremely detailed and graphic description of Gilmore's execution and autopsy, making even my moderate self murmur "Hmm, this is kind of barbaric."
This hasn't even scratched the surface of the depths this book gets to...which, really, are the depths that only a 1,056 page book can. But don't let the page count deter you, as it is an engrossing read, and highly impressive in that it will make you question your outlook, whatever side of the fence you fall on.(less)

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Aug 22, 2007 Cat rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: truecrime

Was I blown away by this book? No. But I read it to the end, and given that the version I read clocks in at over a thousand pages, it's a testament to the "readability" of this book.
I have never read anything by Mailer before, largely because I had an enduring vision of Mailer-the-pompous-celebrity, and that image turned me off. As a 27 year old I am too old to remember a time when Mailer was anything other then a "literary lion".

I decided to read "Executioner's Song" because of it's prominent r...more Was I blown away by this book? No. But I read it to the end, and given that the version I read clocks in at over a thousand pages, it's a testament to the "readability" of this book.
I have never read anything by Mailer before, largely because I had an enduring vision of Mailer-the-pompous-celebrity, and that image turned me off. As a 27 year old I am too old to remember a time when Mailer was anything other then a "literary lion".

I decided to read "Executioner's Song" because of it's prominent role in Matthew Barney's "Cremaster Cycle". In Cremaster II, Barney assumes the role of Gilmore and Mailer himself plays the role of Harry Houdini, who might be Gary's grandfather (the father of Gilmore's father, Frank Gilmore).

"Shot Through the Heart" by Mikal Gilmore (Gary's younger brother" was a book I read back in college, so before picking up Executioner's Song, I already had a thorough familarity with the outlines of the Gilmore story.

The plot is easy enough to summarize: Career criminal gets out of prison after thirteen year sentence, falls in love, breaks up with girlfriend, commits a pair of senseless murders and then refuses to appeal, becoming the first man executed in America in over a decade.

Over four hundred pages of the book deal with the story from the perspective of Lawrence Schiller, a Hollywood Impressario who decided to lock up the rights to Gilmore's story. As I waded through the hundred's of pages dealing with Schiller's struggles, I dealt with a variety of emotions. At first, I was angry, but by the end of the book, I realized that the detailed exploration of the exploitation of Gary Gilmore is really at the heart of this book.

Mailer really focuses the book on the effect that Gilmore's decision to force the hand of the state has on those around him. As a criminal defense attorney, I was tickled by the ACLU types who tried to halt the execution without the permission of Gilmore. Truly, that was a time when America as a culture had not routinized the taking of human life.

I found the most compelling writing to be contained in the first five hundred pages, as Gilmore is realized from prison and attempts to constuct a life. His description's of a man out of balance bring into question the efficacy of volition in the face of destiny. The more one reads Gilmore's own thoughts, the more it becomes clear that he was destined to spend his life in prison.

That he transcended prison and gained lasting immortality by making the choice to die at the hand of the state is something that any casual fan of American pop-culture should consider at length.

At times, Mailer draws direct parallels between Gilmore and celebrity culture, such as when Gilmore, the night before his execution, greets Johnny Cash with the question, "Is this the real Johnny Cash?" This is a resonance that is also at the heart of Barney's Cremaster Cycle. In the words of critic Nancy Spector, the story of Gary Gilmore represents, "The emancipatory potential of moving backward in order to escape one's destiny." (Spector, Only the Perverse Fantasy Can Still Save Us, in the Cremaster Cycle, p. 36) (less)

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Aug 27, 2007 Sara rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

i think that this book got another big pump from matthew barney's cremaster cycle's and thank god. it's incredible. mailer tracks the life and execution of gary gilmore, a man who saw more time inside of a prison than outside-by a large margin-and eventually randomly murdered two mormon men in utah, where he lived for almost nine months after being released from prison and before he was incarcerated again. there's no doubt that this is gilmore's book. and no one else's.

there's no way to summariz...more

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Apr 25, 2013 Mel rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

How beautiful is this prose? It's so beautiful, that I felt like I learned more and more about writing with every sentence I read. I love that Mailer uses a very barebones approach, and that he just lays the information on the line with very little judgment attached. You make your assessment of the situation based on your own feelings - not through Mailer's editorializing. I love that.

Most everything Dave Eggers says in the foreward to this book is true. It's a great look into how we think about...more

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Jan 13, 2013 Heidi rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I don't even know where to begin. This novel, which would probably be considered nonfiction or true crime if it was published today, is all about Gary Gilmore's 1976 murders of two men in Utah, his conviction and death sentence, and his subsequent fight to make the state of Utah carry out his death sentence instead of leaving him in appeal limbo for the next 20 years.

But it goes beyond that simple story. Way beyond. In 1,100 Pulitzer Prize-winning pages, Norman Mailer examines prison life, psych...more I don't even know where to begin. This novel, which would probably be considered nonfiction or true crime if it was published today, is all about Gary Gilmore's 1976 murders of two men in Utah, his conviction and death sentence, and his subsequent fight to make the state of Utah carry out his death sentence instead of leaving him in appeal limbo for the next 20 years.

But it goes beyond that simple story. Way beyond. In 1,100 Pulitzer Prize-winning pages, Norman Mailer examines prison life, psychosis, and the social habits of lowlifes living in the western United States. And by "lowlifes," I mean the people Gilmore spent time with: his girlfriend Nicole, who had already been married three times by the time the book took place (she was 19), had two neglected children, and had sex with anything that could walk, regardless of gender or age. Gilmore's associates (he didn't really know them long enough for them to be called "friends") were the type of people who would hide Gary's stolen guns and other stolen goods without asking any questions. Even Gary's relatives who petitioned for him to get out of prison on parole (he was in prison for armed robbery before he got out on parole and went on his murder spree), although they seemed like the type who would give anyone the shirt off their backs, still weren't exactly mainstream Americans.

The book was more horrifying to me because most of the action took place in Provo, Utah, a city I know fairly well. (I spent summers there as a kid and studied at BYU for a year before transferring to Utah State.) Gary Gilmore saw a much different side of Provo than I saw, and I'm still having trouble reconciling the clean little Happy Valley city with a place where car dealers sell cars for stolen goods and where children's neglect can go unnoticed. Not too far from where I lived (and 20 years earlier), Gary's girlfriend Nicole would send her toddlers to play on the grass on the side of the highway while she got it on in her car with some random guy. In the middle of a different highway, she had a public tug-of-war for her children with some lowlife scum, practically ripping the kids' arms off. The police got involved. And they let her just walk away with the children, not even asking any questions. Her family didn't step in to help because they were all insane too. And nobody else showed up to help out or remove the kids from her care.

Nicole's kids were the only sympathetic characters in the book. They were so little (4 and 3) that they were completely helpless, and I wonder what happened to them after the book ended. I felt bad for Gilmore's family, the ones who had initially gotten him out of prison, but I also wondered what they were expecting. The guy had spent most of his adolescence and adulthood in prison for one thing or another, and they didn't seem to be providing much support. Nicole had a rotten childhood (and was basically still having it, since she was only 19), but, at least the way Mailer wrote her, she was capable of making at least marginally better decisions than the ones she was making. When she would think about how much worse her life would be if she made a particular decision and then would decide to make that decision anyway, I just can't be sympathetic. And Gary? I think the point of the book was to make me see inside his head and judge the man as a human being. But...ugh, I just wanted the guy to hang.

So what made Gary Gilmore murder? What can we blame? His bad childhood? His abusive and often absent father? The drugs he was given in prison? The drugs he took himself? The regimented prison environment, which makes it hard for inmates to re-adjust to freedom once they've done their time? Was there something wrong with his brain chemistry? That's the question with all murderers. If we can figure out why they do it, perhaps we can make it stop. With Gary Gilmore it was inconclusive, at least as far as Norman Mailer's book was concerned. Yes, the prison system could definitely use some improvement. Yes, the anti-psychotics they used in the 1970s had terrible side effects. Yes, a bad childhood has an impact on adult crime rates. And yes, psychopaths really do have different brains than non-psychopaths, and we don't really understand, even now, how their different brain chemistry affects their behaviour.

But it's clear that taking Gary Gilmore out of prison and expecting him to live a crime-free life, with a regular job, family, friends, and barbecues on the weekends, was unrealistic at best and criminally negligent at worst. He would have needed plenty of support (trained support, not just the "We love you very much so can't you please try harder?" sort of support he got from his well-meaning family). I'm not normally a huge supporter of capital punishment, but I'm glad this guy is dead.

So why the four-star rating? I've gone on and on about the grim subject matter (and I would have given the story itself 1 star). But this book was compelling in a Grapes of Wrath sort of way--horribly depressing, but it provided a look at a side of life that I don't see (even when it's happening in my same city). And then there was the writing. Since I didn't study literature I don't have the right words to describe why Mailer's writing is addictive, but I'll try. His sentences were short, precise, and very succinct. But they still managed to convey a complete picture of whatever was going on: the scenery, the way the people looked, the action. He never tried to describe what was going on inside a character's mind...in words. But their motivations were still clear.

So it's 1 or 2 stars for the story, 5 stars (or more) for the way the book was written. I don't know if I'll read Norman Mailer again (this was draining) but I'm glad I read this book. On the other hand, I really can't recommend it to anyone I know except my dad, but he's already read it. The violence, the profanity, the sex scenes (which mostly just come from Gilmore's letters to Nicole from prison and are really just pathetic, but still...) would make anyone I know run screaming in the other direction. So don't say I didn't warn you.(less)

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Dec 07, 2012 Patrick rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This was a very interesting true book about a man, Gary Gilmore, who is sentenced to death in Utah for murdering two people. The book looks into all facets of his life and does not pull any punches. The reporting is truly exhaustive and all people involved receive a full, fair treatment. The deep details lead to some truly remarkable sections of the book, as people's lives are truly examined under a microscope, warts and all. The downside to this is that the book is way too long. The first half...more

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Oct 30, 2012 Nick rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

1086 pages plus an after forward, just in case 1086 pages wasn’t enough.

That’s what I was in for if decided to take Norman Mailer’s ‘The Executioner’s Song’ off the bookshelf

Dave Eggers was quoted on the cover as saying it will be the quickest 1000 pages you’ve ever read.

But could he be trusted? Was this just a literary man’s plea for the work of another titan not to go unread? Or did he genuinely like the book as much as he said?

My hand hovered over the weighty tome and an inner voice said ‘Do...more

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Oct 26, 2012 Shane rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, non-fiction, american-literature, prison-justice

If you ever want to know how crazy the bureaucracy is around the death penalty in this country, read this. Most of us under 40 probably don't know who Gary Gilmore was. I didn't. This book of Mailer's (not anything like his other books, I am told--I haven't read anything else by him) is an exhaustive account of the Gilmore case. Gilmore became famous in the 1970s when he demanded the execution of his the death penalty given to him. This was at a time when there had been an effective ban on execu...more

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Jul 28, 2012 christa rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

What you suspect is wrong with the true crime two-pounder The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer is confirmed when you watch the movie adaptation: The purposely visible fingerprints of the Lawrence Schiller, the man who worked his ass off to turn the unprecedented story of a killer sentenced to death into a made-for-TV movie.

Gary Gilmore had spent most of his life incarcerated by the mid-1970s when he was released from prison and into the hands of his once adoring cousin Brenda in Utah. She set...more What you suspect is wrong with the true crime two-pounder The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer is confirmed when you watch the movie adaptation: The purposely visible fingerprints of the Lawrence Schiller, the man who worked his ass off to turn the unprecedented story of a killer sentenced to death into a made-for-TV movie.

Gary Gilmore had spent most of his life incarcerated by the mid-1970s when he was released from prison and into the hands of his once adoring cousin Brenda in Utah. She sets him up with a room at his Uncle Vern’s house and he gets a job working in Uncle Vern’s shoe shop. But life on the outside takes some adjustments: Gary needs a car, Gary wants a girl, Gary likes to lift 6-packs from grocery stores. He bumbles along socially stunted and lacking impulse control. When he meets Nicole Baker, a 19-year-old, thrice married, mother of two, Gilmore goes gaga for her. They quickly fall into a passionate and super naked love affair filled with the kind of oozy goozy murmurs about fate and lifetimes and souls that are usually reserved for the bodice rippers that were hidden in clothes hampers 50 years ago.

But this sort of passion isn’t all skin-on-sweaty skin: It has a darker side. Gary’s jealous and abusive and Nicole is like a plastic bag in the wind, winding herself against whoever catches her mid-swirl. She leaves him and hides out with one of her many go-to dudes; Gary is dizzy with missing her and trying to find her and winning her back.

There’s other stuff going on, too. Gilmore’s got his eye on a pickup truck, an upgrade on the car he’s been driving. He spends plenty of time trying to talk a used car salesman into selling it to him. He’s quick to fight and his shoplifting is starting to make his family uncomfortable. He’s not exactly a model employee and he’s on his tenth and eleventh chances with the family and friend-like people in the small town.

One especially bad night he kills a man. The next day he kills another. He’s sentenced to death for the murders, but actually bringing an execution to fruition in Utah in the mid-1970s is almost impossible. Odds are, he’ll hang out on death row while his case moves slowly through the legal system. But Gary’s done prison and he’s over it. He wants to be executed, really he does, and he fights anyone who says it should be otherwise.

And this is why Gary Gilmore is famous: Sentenced to death, he accepts the sentence, no one else does. This isn’t much of a spoiler that eventually he wins. But how he gets from Point A to Point Firing Squad is the meat of the story.

It’s a great story, in theory. It’s about growing up in the prison system, family, big huge loin-throbbing love and the death penalty. All of this is some pretty interesting shit. Unfortunately, Lawrence Schiller got involved and turned it into a project. A painstaking, thorough project. He hired teams to interview Gilmore in prison and he interviewed anyone who could tell him anything about Gilmore. He bought the rights to Gilmore’s story for $75,000 and while Gilmore hung out in prison waiting his fate, Schiller dished out pieces of the story to give it the sort of media spin he needs to retain the public’s interest in the case and make himself look less like a vulture.

All of the material Schiller had collected and assembled was handed over to Norman Mailer to turn into a book. More than half of the 1,109 page book is about Schiller’s work, and Mailer’s follow up, and the back and forth within the courts and the process of transcribing and interviewing. There is also an extensive cast list and the back stories on even the most minor characters. And when the movie, starring Tommy Lee Jones as Gilmore, is finally made, Schiller gets a character based on him. Let me say this again: Schiller, the workhorse behind the book and the producer behind the movie is in both. The result is an obnoxious example of embedded journalism where the “I” character gets equal time to the subject.

(Speaking of the film, it isn’t much. It’s unorganized and seems to make an assumption that the viewer knows the story and can recognize the principals without introduction. It is, however, a nice time capsule of what the 1970s looked like. And for anyone whose first glimpse of Rosanna Arquette was the movie “Desperately Seeking Susan,” this is a softer introduction. She’s stunning as Nicole, a young-but-old, naive-but-wise, strong-but-weak woman so wholly invested in Gilmore that she’s willing to stuff a balloon full of suicide pills into a cavity so that Gilmore can extract it and down them -- presumably while she follows suit with her own stash at home. She spends most of the movie topless and/or writhing on Gilmore’s lap and in the process makes a case for herself as having the most amazing breasts to ever dangle over a rib cage.)

Mailer isn’t completely not at fault here. He’s the one who turned a 400-at-most page story into something more than twice as long. He wasn’t Schiller’s first choice to write it, probably not even second. In a recent interview with the Believer, Schiller said he ultimately picked Mailer “Because Norman had stabbed his wife, I felt he understood knee-jerk reactions to violence and what precipitates that kind of violence. That was a very basic, childish thought. You may not remember that Norman had stabbed one of his wives.”

The portraits of Gilmore and Nicole are very complicated and multi-layered and well done. Gilmore is a loose canon in the real world, but when he’s locked up a better version appears. He’s a gifted artist and writes terrifically romantic and naughty letters to Nicole. He’s got a wicked IQ and he’s solid at reading people and anticipating their moves and sometimes even manipulating them. He’s likeable, which gives his handlers pause. While they support him, no one wants to lose him. He’s also got a strong ethic, despite what he’s done. Nicole is as tricky. She’s a contradiction to herself, both dreamy and smart. She knows what she’s doing but she doesn’t. She’s stubborn and a romantic and torn between true love and earthly responsibilities. These two could stand alone as a story, with just hints and shadow of other characters in the background.

It’s a story that gets top billing in its genre, parked next to In Cold Blood in terms of journalism wrapped in novel-form. Real interviews with real people in an attempt to build something as close to real as a writer can get without having personally witnessed Gary Gilmore lifting 6-packs from grocery stores and going buck wild about the lemon he’s driving. And on this level, it might be as close to perfect as something with this design can be -- to a fault. It’s simply too much. Too many people, too much legal, too much back and forth, to many life stories. It just weighs too, too much. And the on and on comes to dilute the parts that are great. (less)

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Jun 15, 2012 Betsey Manzoni rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The voice that Norman Mailer gives to The Executioner’s Song is one that simply cannot be silenced. This story will live in your memory long after you have turned the last page. Mailer has an uncanny way of projecting the reader in the story, as if you were sitting through every interview, and knew every one of those people.

The Executioner’s Song is a factual retelling of the events contributing to and leading up to the execution of murderer Gary Gilmore. Beginning with his early release from a...more

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Jun 14, 2012 Laura rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It is honestly more of a 3.5 star book but since there is no way to enter a half star, I rounded up. Gary Gilmore’s case is a fascinating one to be sure. He murders two men without remorse and is given a death sentence. Instead of fighting for his life, Gary is struggling to have his death sentence carried out. Some say it is a book about media manipulation while others say it is a love story. Well, at 1056 pages it is a book about many things. I have read people who believe that Gary was not in...more

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Oct 05, 2011 Anastasia rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I've become interesting in Normal Mailer that last six months or so and this is the third book of his that I picked up. It's a hefty tome at 1050 pages. Sucked me in from page one. wonderful depiction of some interesting and gritty characters. Especially enjoyed the back drop of Provo, UT in the '70s. The book gives a wonderful sense of culture and history set against a rugged backdrop. Have to say that I hit the wall around page 700. Became very bored with all of the back and forth and descript...more

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Aug 09, 2011 Ryan Milbrath rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Norman Mailer’s masterpiece, The Executioner’s Song, is a seminal work of New Journalism. Mailer, among others like, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Truman Capote, combines a research essay with a novel format. In other words, it’s a non-fiction novel – if there is such a thing. The topic for Mailer’s exploration is the infamous Gary Gilmore. Gilmore is the first man to be executed in the state of Utah since the United States reinstated the death penalty in 1975.

Mailer paints a comprehensiv...more

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Aug 06, 2011 Nikole rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I first discovered this book as a teenager , poking around my parents bookshelf. I hadn't expected to find much there, aside from the hundreds* of cook books, nursing books and other non fiction reference type books that I would find terribly dull as I had little interest in cooking or becoming a nurse.

Over my teen years I would return again and again to this book. I had the distinct feeling that my parents would disapprove of me reading it-due to the subject matter and language-so I slowly made...more

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Dec 10, 2010 Jason Pettus rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called literary classics, then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label

Essay #52: The Executioner's Song (1980), by Norman Mailer

The story in a nutshell:
One of the last great hurrahs from the so-called "New Journalism" of the coun...more

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Oct 05, 2010 Rob Maynard rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book was all the rage-caused a lot of rage-when I was a freshman in college. I passed on it at the time because I hadn't started reading Mailer and I didn't like the idea that it glorified a loser-murderer such as Gary Gilmore.

But this book is a masterwork of reportage and writing. At over a thousand pages it's a commitment, not a light read. But Mailer's writing and reporting partnership with Lawrence Schiller, which began with this book, yields an amazing time capsule of America in the 19...more

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Jan 05, 2010 Stafford Davis rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This book is massive. As it has 1,056 pages, it is both massive in an encyclopedic and weight sense. I suspect some would bog down, not finish it, and more usefully make a door stop or booster chair out of it. It’s also massive in more important historical ways. The Executioner’s Song is the true story of Gary Gilmore, who spent most of his life in prison and was finally executed in 1977. The book starts with Gilmore’s parole and his attempt to reconnect with his guarded family in Utah. The read...more This book is massive. As it has 1,056 pages, it is both massive in an encyclopedic and weight sense. I suspect some would bog down, not finish it, and more usefully make a door stop or booster chair out of it. It’s also massive in more important historical ways. The Executioner’s Song is the true story of Gary Gilmore, who spent most of his life in prison and was finally executed in 1977. The book starts with Gilmore’s parole and his attempt to reconnect with his guarded family in Utah. The reader follows as he tries to reestablish himself in a society that makes no sense to him. He is hopeless in so many ways that one would feel sorry for him if he wasn’t such an asshole. Norman Mailer portrays Gilmore as a man that makes short sighted and shabby efforts to live a normal life but is offset and eventually betrayed by his inability to understand denial. Despite being intelligent and articulate, he lacks qualities that seem to be innate to most, in that he has no understanding of his relationship to others and the consequences his behavior produces. He is selfish and egocentric to the core producing an evil aspect that Mailer expertly portrays.

A passage about Gary Gilmore and his tormented girlfriend, Nicole Baker.
With her eyes closed, she had the odd feeling of an evil presence near her that came from Gary. She found it kind of half agreeable. Said to herself, Well, if he is the devil, maybe I want to get closer. It wasn’t a terrifying sensation so much as a strong and strange feeling, like Gary was a magnet and had brought down a lot of spirits on himself.
Midway though the book, Gilmore murders two innocent people, is arrested and sent back to prison. Eventually convicted of the crimes, Gilmore gets caught up in moral and philosophical battles from opposing sides of the legal spectrum. He becomes a media sensation as he fights for his right to die, because at the time of the murders there was no death penalty in the U.S. Gilmore fights judges, governors, Mormons, publishing agents, journalists, and lawyers in a postmodern media circus for his chance to become the first man killed in America’s newly reinstated death penalty. He serves as the ‘executioner.'

An interview between Gilmore and a journalist.
Interviewer: Your I.Q.’s supposedly about 130, and yet you’ve spent almost 19 of the past 22 years behind bars. Why were you never able to get away with anything?
Gilmore: I got away with a couple of things. I ain’t a great thief. I’m impulsive. Don’t plan, don’t think. You don’t have to be a superintelligent to get away with shit, you just have to think. But I don’t. I’m impatient. Not greedy enough. I could have gotten away with lots of things that I got caught for. I don’t, ah, really understand it. Maybe I quit caring a long time ago.
What’s amazing to me is that a novel came out of all this. One that won its author the Pulitzer Prize for the second time. Mailer is one of the originators of, ‘The New Journalism' which is a way to tell a factual story in a fictive structure. Mailer assembled this book over the course of two years by sifting through interviews, court transcripts, newspapers, and interviewing almost all of the people involved himself. The story is a solid read in that it gives the reader a true sense and honest portrait of the characters involved as well as the period. Mailer has an invisible style that never intrudes into the narrative with his opinion, but rather populates the multifaceted landscape of an American tale with this unique document. (less)

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Dec 07, 2009 Dave James rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Norman Mailer is a journalist, controversialist and novelist, in that order. He made his name in the 40s with the for that time too sexually explicit The Naked and the Dead. Armies of the Night was an account of the marches on the White House protesting Vietnam, featuring naturally as central character Norman Mailer. The Executioner's Song is brilliant journalism and a riveting novel combined. I would say it rivals Capote's In Cold Blood in its depiction of the so-called 'criminal mind.' It goes...more

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Dec 01, 2009 Kara rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I read this book when I was 14 and it had an out sized impact on me. An unrelenting, exhaustive and harrowing account of 9 months (from when he is released on parole to the day of his execution), of Gary Gilmore's life. The book is based almost exclusively on accounts from Gary Gilmore's family and friends and is written in an unperformative, transparent style that is exceedingly, exhaustively detailed but remarkably never boring or tedious.

In inscrutable detail, Mailer follows Gilmore's pitiful...more
I read this book when I was 14 and it had an out sized impact on me. An unrelenting, exhaustive and harrowing account of 9 months (from when he is released on parole to the day of his execution), of Gary Gilmore's life. The book is based almost exclusively on accounts from Gary Gilmore's family and friends and is written in an unperformative, transparent style that is exceedingly, exhaustively detailed but remarkably never boring or tedious.

In inscrutable detail, Mailer follows Gilmore's pitiful life. An intractably violent product of America's prisons (he spent 20 of his 35 years in prison), Gilmore robbed and killed two innocent men by shooting them point blank in the backs of their heads, and then insisted on dying for his crimes. The book follows his fight with the judicial system that was intent on keeping him alive after sentencing him to death. By refusing to appeal his sentence, Gilmore sent the justice system into chaos.

At 14 I was not above the erotic allure of the condemned murderer or above being conned, and Gilmore had a highly evolved con man style. He was not a raving lunatic wielding an axe or a ski masked rapist. He was complicated, charming yet violent, insecure but also self aggrandizing, uneducated yet poetic. His story is set against a grim, melancholy backdrop - Provo, Utah. But even a landscape as bleak as this manages to evoke an impossibly quixotic trailerparkesque allure. Without explanation or editorializing, but through Gilmore's own words, interactions, relationships (particularly with Nicole, his teenaged welfare-mother girlfriend with her own headful of romantic ideas - of "meeting beyond the grave" -and their increasingly desperate and romantic love letters), the snowballing media circus, the fumbled lover's suicide pacts....a seductive picture of a killer and a killer's life/world is painted.

The culmination of all this takes place in 1979 in the Utah State Pen "death house" - an abandoned cannery behind the prison, where after eating hard boiled eggs and coffee, he is strapped to a chair with a wall of sandbags behind him and shot to death by a firing squad. So much for romance. (less)

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