Mailer at 81

The Scotsman has a profile of Norman Mailer on the writer’s eighty-first birthday.

Two factors have denied [Mailer] the accolades he deserves. First, he has produced no incontrovertibly great book. The Naked and the Dead is a young man’s work, visceral, naive, derivative, shapelessly insightful. For all his obsession with the novel as a form – he calls it “great Bitch Goddess” – Mailer has only produced one novel that flirts with greatness and again the “intertextuality” is a giveaway.

Read the article in full here.