A Gem Unearthed: Wars and Elections
Miami and the Siege of Chicago
(New York Review Books, July 2007)
I'm behind in reading my NYRB and found Frank Rich's review of Mailer's Miami and Siege of Chicago in the 29 May 2008 edition. It arrives just in time to help me sort out my review of Ethan Canin's America America. Canin's book covers a similar era to Mailer's: Vietnam and a Nixon-era election. Of course, the rich, languid voice of Canin's novel is a far cry from the compact muscular voice of Mailer's. Is it fair to compare? To a point. Both authors took on a similar timeline in American history, both were trying to get to the heart of American politics -- what's right, wrong, or downright insane about it. You'd think that a fictional coverage of those events would have the potential to crackle and explode with prescient moments of dark humor and doom, that fiction could push the envelope and deliver more than a non-fiction account of those years. However, based on Rich's review, it sounds like Mailer's book delivers the knockout punch. Could this be a case where the voice used to deliver the story doomed one book, and vaulted another into the land of the classics?
In case you don't have time for all of Rich's review, here's my favorite bit:
"Mailer's book holds up better than most political journalism written last week, let alone four decades ago. Indeed it survives better than it has any right to -- as history, as literature, and as a portrait of America both then and now.
As a narrative of the summer's acutal political events it is both compactly comprehensive and dead-on, often hilariously so. And not just when serving up Richard Nixon. Mailer's Dickensian portraiture revivifies even the half-remembered. Eugene McCarthy seemed less a presidential prospect than 'the dean of the finest English department in the land.' John Connally boasted 'a thin-lipped Texas grin, a confident grin -- it spoke of teeth which knew how far they could bite into every bone, pie, nipple or tit.' Hubert Humphrey employed 'a formal slovenliness of syntax which enabled him to shunt phrases back and forth like a switchman who locates a freight car by moving everything in the yard.' Mayor Richard Daley looked at his worst 'like a vastly robust peasant woman with a dirty gray silk wig' and at his best 'respectable enough to be coach of the Chicago Bears.'"