Country: USA
Genre: Non-Fiction Novel
Pages: 1023
Death penalty is a subject that fascinates me. I find it's a very loaded thing to call a human being unfit for life, no matter what he did. Unless he's a wild, feral animal with no soul, it's a huge decision to "off" someone in a corporate manner. To deny his life, his experience and his ambitions, the same way a human being, in a moment of frenzied rage, would have done so. I thought that writing a novel on death penalty, exposing the magnitude of system sponsored killing, without taking sides. It's too complex of an issue. But that was before I read Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song. He's a man who's ego is so large that it might just be the best thing about him. In this case, it drove him to believe he could write the most extensive novel/thesis on the scope of death penalty. And write it, he did. The Executioner's Song is a crippling account of the consequences of institutionalized violence. It's a complete triumph, and one of the most challenging novels I have been blessed to read.
If you don't know who Gary Gilmore is, here's what you need to know if you don't want people to look at you funny in discussions. He was the first death sentenced convict to be executed after the Furman Vs Georgia arrest and the lift of death sentence suspension in the U.S. Not so glamorous, I know. But here's how Gilmore permanently scarred the American dreamscape. After being sentenced in October of 1976, he insisted to be executed right away and waived his right to appeal. Having spent already almost half of his life in prison and tasted a few weeks of elusive happiness with his girlfriend Nicole on the outside, he refused to keep rotting inside, knowing his inevitable fate. He's been accused of playing the system, of wanting to commit system-assisted suicide, but he had a valid point. The judiciary system sentenced him to die for the murders of Max Jensen and Ben Bushnell and he accepted the decision gracefully. He confronted America to its decision and to its system of value. And he somehow beat the system who turned him into who he was.
We all know what happened. We know that Gilmore has been executed by firing squad. We know his last words (I'm not going to spoil them if you don't), but it's very important that you know all this when you pick up this novel. You have to know what you're in for. The end of Gary Gilmore is the invisible string that ties The Executioner's Song together. Mailer draws a portrait of every life that has been implicated with Gary Gilmore since he was released from prison and tried to start his life over with the help of her cousin Brenda, in Utah. That's how he makes it work. He starts from a very broad view of a city that slowly creeps into the terror of the new citizen, the ex-convict that doesn't understand them, despite speaking their language. They live in a complete structural difference. Gilmore knows the codes of prison and survival, and the city of Provo knows the codes of society and personal freedom. Incomprehension built up anger, which brought in alcohol and pills, which brought rage and murder of two innocent people.
I have watched the A&E documentary on Gilmore and a guest psychologist said something very interesting: "Gilmore was a product of prison, which I consider a completely communist environment. You're told what to do, when to eat, when to go to bed. When he came out, he couldn't handle the freedom that was offered to him". Going through the pages of The Executioner's Song, it made perfect sense. He tried to settle down with Nicole, who he met a few days after arriving in Utah, but the logic of society didn't make sense to him and he kept wanting all those things, all this lifestyle without having to pay for them. The second part of the novel zeroes in on the case and the life of Gilmore on death row. The second half is a lot heavier than the first because it concentrates on the circus that Gilmore created with his demands. From the judicial case to the predatory world of show business who's trying to bully stories out of him and to get the rights to his story. It's fascinating in it's own right, but a lot more difficult.
The hitches of The Executioner's Song are minor. There is a LOT of correspondence in between Gary and Nicole, where they don't say much, except how they love each other and need each other badly. It's interesting to see the absence triggering those violent emotions, but there's close to a hundred pages of this stuff. I ended up cross-reading them at the end, because they didn't say anything I didn't already know about Gilmore and Nicole, except maybe that they implied an increasingly manic relationship. That's about the worse I can say about this novel. It's not the most spectacular prose, you might even not recognize Mailer's signature style because it's structured around the facts only. But it's those very facts that touch a cord. Those lives, the reach of death penalty within a nation. It's a project of an insane magnitude that not many people could have done right. Reading The Executioner's Song was an excruciating, yet invigorating nine days of intense reading. Now it proudly occupies a place on my shelf. It's a novel I'm going to go back to and discuss for years to come.
Pulitzer Prize Winner/Nominee
Winner 1980
