The Executioner's Song in Classics Without All the Class

Apr 13, 2012 rachel rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2012, the-best, 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 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. ...more

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Nov 29, 2015 Rob rated it really liked it

This was a great book, that informed me the passenger seat airbag was engaged if I threw it onto the passenger seat of my Prius. Over a thousand pages, more acute editing was probably called for. The first 500 pages were a marvel. Mailer's omniscient narrator writes in the diction of the particular characters he is introducing you to, from articulate attorneys and writers to unread rural poor white folks. The effect is stunning- creating an atmosphere that informs along with the salient points t ...more

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