In In Cold Blood, Capote took the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas and transformed it into literature. He created suspense, reconstructed conversations, moved between perspectives and, most troublingly, made us understand Perry Smith.
Capote removed himself from the book, but he was everywhere in its choices. He decided where we looked, what we knew and when we knew it.
So after writing about In Cold Blood, I was left with another question. What happens if the writer tries to get out of the way?
Thirteen years after Capote's book appeared, Norman Mailer offered an answer. Sort of.
Another murderer, another enormous American book
In April 1976, Gary Gilmore was released on parole after spending much of his adult life in prison. Within months he had murdered two men in Utah, petrol station employee Max Jensen and motel manager Bennie Bushnell, shooting them on consecutive nights during robberies.
Gilmore was arrested, convicted of Bushnell's murder and sentenced to death. Then the story became something much larger because Gilmore didn't want to appeal. He wanted to die.
Nobody had been executed in the United States for almost ten years. The Supreme Court had effectively halted executions in 1972 before allowing revised death penalty laws several years later, which meant Gilmore was suddenly more than a murderer awaiting punishment. He became a national argument about capital punishment. Lawyers tried to stop his execution. Civil liberties organisations became involved. Journalists arrived. Television arrived. America watched while Gilmore continued to insist that the state carry out his sentence.
On 17 January 1977, Utah did.
Gilmore was executed by firing squad at Utah State Prison. His final words, "Let's do it", became famous.
Two years later, Norman Mailer published more than a thousand pages about him.
Haven't we been here before?
It is almost impossible to approach The Executioner's Song without seeing In Cold Blood standing behind it. They are inextricably linked. Once again, a celebrated American novelist takes a real murder, researches the lives surrounding it, enters the consciousness of the murderer and uses the techniques of fiction to organise factual material. Capote called his book a "non-fiction novel". Mailer called his a "true life novel".
The resemblance was obvious, and Capote was not especially delighted by it. But an important difference existed between the two books. Mailer seemed to understand the problem Capote had created, and he attempted something radically different.
Capote's artistry is continually visible in In Cold Blood. Even when he disappears as a character, you can feel him arranging the furniture. Mailer tries to retreat. He suppresses the flamboyant Norman Mailer voice, flattens his prose and allows the speech of Gilmore, his family, his lovers and the people around him to dominate.
Mailer avoided some of Capote's factual deceptions by openly partnering with journalist Larry Schiller, who amassed thousands of pages of verified transcripts and audio tapes. This was a massive step change for a writer not known for making himself inconspicuous.
Don't gild the gold
Mailer knew he had extraordinary material. Gary Gilmore was already almost implausibly novelistic: a violent man who had spent much of his life imprisoned, emerged briefly into the outside world, fell into an obsessive relationship with a young woman called Nicole Baker, committed two murders and then demanded that the state kill him. Around him gathered lawyers, journalists, relatives, prison officials, campaigners and opportunists.
Years later, Mailer described his approach to the material simply: "What I had was gold." His task, as he saw it, was not to gild it.
That idea explains much of what makes The Executioner's Song feel so different from In Cold Blood. Mailer doesn't need to make Gilmore interesting. Gilmore has already done that. Instead, Mailer writes in deliberately plain, restrained sentences, subverting his usual flamboyant, self-referential style for plain, hard-boiled declarative sentences. People speak in the rhythms of their own lives. Events accumulate without the visible hand of a novelist constantly announcing their significance.
The effect is strange. The more Mailer suppresses himself, the more the world around Gilmore seems to emerge.
And that world mattered enormously to Joan Didion.
A voice as flat as the horizon
Didion reviewed The Executioner's Song in 1979 and immediately recognised that Mailer's apparent simplicity was doing something much more ambitious. She described the language as having a voice "as flat as the horizon", a description that gets remarkably close to the experience of reading the book.
Utah is not merely the setting. Roads, motels, petrol stations, trailers, prisons and cars moving across enormous distances become part of the emotional architecture of the story. People leave and return. Relationships begin and collapse. Violence erupts and then the landscape seems to swallow it. Behind everything there is space.
Didion believed this was the real subject of Mailer's book. Beneath Gilmore, beneath the execution and beneath the enormous machinery that gathers around him, she identified what she called the "vast emptiness at the centre of the Western experience". It produced, she wrote, a dread "so close to zero that human voices fade out".
That line changes the way I think about The Executioner's Song because human voices are almost all Mailer gives us. Yet the longer the book continues, the more those voices seem to disappear into something larger than themselves. People talk, argue, and make plans, but the landscape remains indifferent. The roads continue. The mountains remain. The sky is enormous.
The American West is not freedom, but emptiness.
What the women know
There is something else Didion noticed that is easy to miss if you approach the book expecting a thousand-page study of Gary Gilmore. Some of the strongest voices in its first half belong to women: Nicole, Brenda and Bessie, women who love men, endure men, wait for men, remember men and continue living after men have moved on or disappeared.
Didion's observation about this is brutal. In this Western world, men shoot, get shot and move on, while women inherit the stories. It opens the book up because The Executioner's Song stops being simply a psychological portrait of one murderer and becomes something closer to a chorus of people caught in his gravitational field.
That matters when we compare Mailer with Capote. One of the uncomfortable achievements of In Cold Blood is Perry Smith's gravitational pull. Four members of the Clutter family are murdered, yet Perry gradually becomes the book's most psychologically compelling figure. The murderer acquires depth while the murdered become memory.
Mailer doesn't entirely escape that problem. How could he? Gilmore dominates the book. But the chorus around him is louder. Other lives keep intruding and, often, their ordinary voices tell us more about Gilmore than Gilmore tells us about himself.
But is Mailer really gone?
This is where the apparent solution begins to unravel. It is tempting to say that Mailer solved the Capote problem. Capote manipulates; Mailer records. Capote aestheticises; Mailer documents. Capote transforms reality; Mailer allows reality to speak.
Except, of course, he doesn't. No writer can.
Mailer worked from an enormous archive of interviews and documentary material, much of it assembled by Lawrence Schiller and his researchers. Somebody still had to transform all of that material into a book, and that somebody was Norman Mailer.
He selected one conversation and discarded another. He decided where scenes began and ended. He chose when to move from one consciousness to another and which details deserved to survive. He determined when Gary Gilmore entered the story and how long we remained with him.
The absence of an obvious authorial voice does not mean the absence of an author.
It may simply mean the author has become better at hiding.
The invisible writer still chooses
Imagine I record an hour-long conversation with you. You say ten thousand words, and I publish five hundred. Every word I publish is yours. Nothing has been invented, and nothing has been altered.
And yet I can make you appear wise, foolish, generous, vain, funny, cruel or ridiculous simply by deciding which five hundred words survive.
That is the writer's power. It is totally selective. That's what writers do. They leave stuff out.
Not necessarily invention, but arrangement.
This is why Mailer's apparent withdrawal is so fascinating. He can remove the grand literary voice. He can avoid Capote's lyrical descriptions. He can let his subjects speak. But Mailer still decides the order in which we hear those voices. Reality supplies the material, but the writer determines its shape.
Reality supplies the notes.
The writer still composes the song.
The clue is in the title.
Then the media arrive
There is another reason The Executioner's Song feels like such a natural successor to In Cold Blood. Capote arrived in Kansas after the Clutters were murdered and helped transform their deaths into a cultural phenomenon. By the time Gary Gilmore was waiting to die, the machinery of storytelling was already there.
Reporters descended. Television crews arrived. Rights were negotiated. Money entered the story. People who knew Gilmore discovered that proximity to murder had acquired commercial value, and Gilmore himself participated in the process.
This part of the book feels startlingly contemporary because a human catastrophe gradually becomes intellectual property. Who owns the interview? Who owns the photographs? Who owns the prisoner's story? Who gets the film rights? Who gets paid? Who gets to tell it first?
We tend to think of the transformation of murder into content as something created by Netflix, podcasts and social media. The Executioner's Song reminds us that the machinery was already running. Gary Gilmore understood that his death had become an event. The media understood it too.
Mailer arrived at the end of the production line and turned the whole extraordinary spectacle into literature.
And what about the dead men?
Then there are Max Jensen and Bennie Bushnell. If those names are less familiar than Gary Gilmore, that tells us something.
It is the same problem that followed us out of In Cold Blood. Murderers make compelling characters. Victims have the unfortunate literary disadvantage of being dead. They cannot generate new material, give interviews, behave unpredictably or announce that they want to be executed. The story keeps moving while they remain at the point where it began.
Gilmore becomes famous. His psychology is examined. His love life becomes part of the narrative. His execution becomes national news. His final words become legend. Norman Mailer writes a thousand-page masterpiece about him.
Meanwhile, two men who went to work and happened to encounter Gary Gilmore become the reason all of this exists. There is something deeply uncomfortable about that. There should be.
The writer who stepped aside
So did Norman Mailer solve Truman Capote's problem? I don't think he did.
But he did something perhaps more interesting. Capote showed us what happens when a writer visibly transforms reality into literature. Mailer shows us that the transformation still takes place when the writer tries to disappear.
And perhaps that is why Didion's description of The Executioner's Song stays with me. That immense Western emptiness. That dread so close to zero that voices disappear into it. Mailer seems to empty himself out too. The famous Norman Mailer voice retreats while Gary and Nicole and Brenda and Bessie occupy the space.
But somewhere, almost invisible, Norman Mailer is still making every decision.
So can a writer ever get out of the way?
No. I don't think they can. Perhaps they shouldn't pretend to.
Joan Didion warned us that writers are always selling somebody out. Rachel Cusk made me wonder what happens when the person being turned into literature recognises themselves. Truman Capote made the problem more disturbing by taking real murder and transforming it into something beautiful.
Norman Mailer tries another approach. Step back. Flatten the prose. Listen to the voices. Don't gild the gold.
But somebody still decides what goes in the book. Somebody decides whose voice we hear and which dead man becomes a name while which murderer becomes a character. Somebody decides what all of it means.
The writer can step out of the frame.
He cannot stop holding the camera.
Which leaves me with another question.
If the writer can never really disappear, would we trust them more if they simply admitted they were there?
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