Cures for Cancer

Norman Mailer’s Deaths for the Ladies (And Other Disasters)

Abstract

Formal criticism has tended to neglect Deaths for the Ladies, but the text may be seen to serve as a kind of shorthand portfolio of Mailer’s recurring themes and tropes at the beginning of the 1960s. Mailer himself proposes that the text be read as “a movie in words,” but the text itself undermines the validity of any such governing metaphors, and instead valorizes an aesthetic of improvisation and discontinuity. The complexities of the text insist that the poems be approached as carefully shaped fragments that address, in fascinating ways, Mailer’s complex dialectical conception of growth and stasis—his ever-evolving politics of growth.