From God’s Attic to Boom-Boom Slang

Looking for Mailer’s LQ

Abstract

Michael L. Shuman reviews Donald L. Kaufmann’s Norman Mailer: Legacy and Literary Americana (Scholars’ Press). He opens with Kaufmann telling, at a Norman Mailer Society conference, of the aging Mailer angrily refusing his help on a steep ramp. Shuman finds the book’s emotional core in personal stories like this one, especially Kaufmann’s account of bringing Mailer to Alaska, which he credits as the origin of Why Are We in Vietnam? Shuman then examines Kaufmann’s “Legacy Quotient,” a scale for measuring Mailer’s literary staying power against the “isms,” the mass media, and his contemporaries, Jewish-American novelists in particular. He also covers Kaufmann’s top-ten list, which puts Of a Fire on the Moon first. Shuman calls the book, together with Lennon’s A Double Life and Sipiora’s Mind of an Outlaw, a valuable starting point for defining Mailer’s legacy.