Radical Fictions and the Novels of Norman Mailer

by Nigel Leigh

"I want to know how power works, how it really works, in detail," Norman Mailer once announced to James Baldwin. In Radical Fictions, Nigel Leigh provides a fascinating and much needed examination of what Mailer found out about power, outlining the important political transformations of each of his novels from the ideological postwar classic The Naked and the Dead through to the mythopoeic epic Ancient Evenings. Leigh establishes for the first time Mailer's credentials as a radical novelist seeking usable as well as imaginative truths about Marxism, the right, self, sexuality, language, consciousness, aesthetics, and myth. This compellingly argued study sheds new light on the way Mailer's fiction develops, challenges the authority of much of the previous wisdom in the field, and adds an extra dimension to our understanding of this often controversial, often complex author.

206 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1990