Readers of Richard Bradford's Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer may leave it in a state of wonder--not at how Mailer managed to write so many amazing books, two Pulitzer Prize-winners among them, but at how he didn't spend more of his time in jail. Throughout his 84 years, Mailer dispensed punches like handshakes and abused four of his six wives, infamously nearly killing one. But Tough Guy makes a sturdy case for Mailer as, if not a great guy, the author of era-defining books and a cultural force worth reckoning with.
Mailer was born in 1923, the first child of an accountant with a gambling addiction and his long-suffering wife. Growing up in Brooklyn, Mailer wasn't much of a reader, but he was a brain and, at age 16, began attending Harvard, where he first tried his hand at writing the superb, hard-edged realistic fiction for which he would initially become known. Veteran biographer Bradford (Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires; Martin Amis) reliably illuminates how Mailer's work reflected his life at the time; in 1991's Harlot's Ghost, for example, Mailer "found in his fictionalised world of espionage parallels with own lifelong addiction to cheating and infidelity." Bradford is unsparing in his criticism of Mailer, referring to his "career as a shifty literary narcissist," but he justifies the existence of this biography on the grounds that Mailer's life story "comes as close as is possible to being the Great American Novel; beyond reason, inexplicable, wonderfully grotesque and addictive." Tough Guy has the latter two qualities. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer