Tough Guys Don’t Dance
Norman Mailer
Random House
The
style of the novel is a game in which Mickey Spillane meets the Beats, who
spill and wash over him in the end like a wave. Nothing too literal, not Spillane
and not the Beats, not too fine a point on it, because what Mailer wants and
counts on and nurtures like a pythoness is the breath of Poe occurring in the
seam.
This
accounts for the inchoate jumble perceived, it might almost be said, by some of
the critics. The character is wobbly, that of the narrator, he is a writer and
suffers the sea change.
Mailer
has sacrificed a surface precision for one of form, which is the content, and
the bonus he reaps is an unexacted potential for le mot juste. “With the sun on his face he looked,
particularly at this short distance, like a dollop of oatmeal.”