Reply #23: The hagiographers seem to have overlooked that he stabbed his wife for kicks while drunk

[Psephos]

And then used it for literary material.

After his remarkable debut in The Naked and the Dead, his writing became ever more verbose and ever less competent. Like his hero Hemingway, he largely squandered his considerable early talent on booze, dissolution, and fascination with violence. Just try to get through even one chapter of The Gospel According to the Son (1997). Mailer, for most pseudoliterati, is an author to talk about knowingly and approvingly, but not to actually read. You can't; crystal meth wouldn't keep you awake.

He was a pugnacious sexist narcissist who thought nothing of making other people feel bad (either emotionally or physically), loved the expression of power through sexual subversion (he was fixated on buggery), and embodied all the worst parts of the macho mindset. It makes the mind wobble to see him spoken of so approvingly on a progressive board.

R.I.P. Mailer. You had none while you were alive, and neither did anyone unfortunate enough to be involved with you.