Historical novel tests notion of nation
The past explains the present but not the future because ‘that tiny chaos’ makes the future opaque
Joan Didion
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‘Norman was a working man. Lord, did he work’
Norman Mailer would probably not have wanted an old man’s death. He would have preferred some other way — an accident, a bar fight or a lover’s brawl — so that his death, like his life, could inspire or appal or, above all, make people talk. But Mailer, a giant of American literature, died of renal failure on Saturday in a New York hospital bed.
