The Executioner's Song

The Executioner's Song
by Norman Mailer
read: 2012
Pulitzer Prize

Just a few weeks after tackling David Foster Wallace's magnum opus Infinite Jest, I decided to have a go at Mailer's 1000-pager The Executioner's Song.  I had read an article over at N+1 about crime and decided reading The Executioner's Song would help me understand more about the criminal justice system.  I don't know if it did that, but it was a terrific, gripping read.

The element I appreciated most was the moral ambiguity.  Gary Gilmore (the central figure, who committed two murders and was sentenced to death in Utah in the late 1976) has qualities we can sympathize with: he's thoughtful, intelligent, spiritual, can be sweet, and ultimately just wants to be loved.  We don't fully know what happened to him in the 14 years he spent mostly in prison early in his adult life, and we don't fully understand how his early childhood or stay in reform school shaped his later behavior, but there's a sense that things might have been different.  At the same time, Mailer in no way absolves Gilmore for his crimes, nor does he excuse them as a one-time lapse.  Gilmore is a disturbed, violent person with definite sociopathic tendencies.  He has a real and terrible impact on everyone whose life he touches.  But no human is one thing, even a man who murders two innocent people in cold blood, and we are left to confront the idea that there is something of Gary Gilmore in all of us.

The book is presented as non-fiction, though it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1980.  It is written as a novel, including with specific scenes of dialogue.  It is impossible to tell what Mailer knows for sure, where he is repeating verbatim from interviews, where he is assembling scenes from various, possibly conflicting accounts, and where he is filling in gaps with fiction.  Certain scenes stand out in my mind - like what Gilmore said before killing his first victim - as fabrications where Mailer couldn't possibly know the truth.  It's not unethical, but it's not entirely journalistic at the same time.  Looking past that, I thought The Executioner's Song was excellent and thought-provoking.