Norman Mailer’s Janus-Faced Project

Abstract

Maggie McKinley reviews Jerry Schuchalter’s Norman Mailer and the Modernist Turn (Peter Lang), which places Mailer within European modernist dissent and casts him as an artist-prophet who looks back to a mythic past while facing the future. McKinley praises Schuchalter’s readings of Mailer alongside Nietzsche, Otto Weininger, and Oswald Spengler, his attention to little-known Dissent essays, and his chapter on Ancient Evenings, which she considers the book’s centerpiece. She questions his complaints about Mailer’s loose use of terms such as “cancer” and “totalitarianism,” arguing that Mailer joins the literal and the metaphorical deliberately, and she rejects Schuchalter’s conclusion that Mailer’s legacy is becoming a relic.