The Executioner's Song

Rating:
Summary: Unbearably Bleak But Undeniably True
Review: I live in rural Utah, the location of Norman Mailer's bleak masterpiece "The Executioner's Song." I am not a fan of Mailer's fiction; it's leaden and overwrought. But he was a great journalist and I have to give him props; this is as true a portrait of the blue-collar Mountain West as you will find in American literature outside of James Crumley. He captures the emptiness and desperation, and the strength and fortitude in the face of unbearable tragedy. Gary Gilmore was a psychopath and a cheap thug, but Mailer finds the undeniable humanity in him and every one of the other characters in his vast drama. Sometimes the presentation of Mormon theology is crude and reductive, but you have to remember Mailer is speaking through the voices of people who have only an imperfect understanding. He does capture the decency and vitality of working-class and middle-class Mormons. I wonder if the Coen brothers read this book before they made "Fargo." I can definitely see a resemblance.

Rating:
Summary: Thoroughly absorbing
Review: I started reading "The Executioner's Song" after completing Jon Krakauer's "Under the Banners of Heaven," a largely scathing account of the history of the Church of Latter-Day Saints and the culture of violence it has spawned during its 150 year existence. While Gary Gilmore isn't a Mormon, most of the story takes place in Utah, and many of the characters are Mormons, which shapes to some degree their views of the death penalty as a necessary "blood atonement" for murder.

I ended up plowing through the entire book in two weeks--that's how compelling a story Mailer paints in this lengthy, but engaging true-crime fiction hybrid. As others have mentioned, it's the first-half of this book that is the true masterpiece, the frenzied tale of the few months between Gilmore's release from prison and his cold-blooded murder of two young Mormon men, told in spare and unadorned prose. I was stunned by the level of detail he employs, and unlike some who found it tedious, thought that it brought the characters to life in a way I have rarely encountered in either fiction or non-fiction. While the second half of the book is somewhat overly drawn out, his portrayal of the marketing of the Gilmore myth (which, ironically, Mailer is involved in himself) is worth the time.

"The Executioner's Song" is full of people and moments told with a clarity that makes it unique and memorable.

Rating:
Summary: Thoroughly absorbing
Review: I started reading "The Executioner's Song" after completing Jon Krakauer's "Under the Banners of Heaven," a largely scathing account of the history of the Church of Latter-Day Saints and the culture of violence it has spawned during its 150 year existence. While Gary Gilmore isn't a Mormon, most of the story takes place in Utah, and many of the characters are Mormons, which shapes to some degree their views of the death penalty as a necessary "blood atonement" for murder.

I ended up plowing through the entire book in two weeks--that's how compelling a story Mailer paints in this lengthy, but engaging true-crime fiction hybrid. As others have mentioned, it's the first-half of this book that is the true masterpiece, the frenzied tale of the few months between Gilmore's release from prison and his cold-blooded murder of two young Mormon men, told in spare and unadorned prose. I was stunned by the level of detail he employs, and unlike some who found it tedious, thought that it brought the characters to life in a way I have rarely encountered in either fiction or non-fiction. While the second half of the book is somewhat overly drawn out, his portrayal of the marketing of the Gilmore myth (which, ironically, Mailer is involved in himself) is worth the time.

"The Executioner's Song" is full of people and moments told with a clarity that makes it unique and memorable.

Rating:
Summary: 1000+ pages of everything
Review: Is "The Executioner's Song" a novel or a piece of journalism? If you read the afterword and know what everything that is written actually happened you would think the latter. And it is, but the writing is so compelling it is also a piece of literature like Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood".

In short, the story is about Gary Gilmore, a villain who has been in jails and correction centers for most of his life but who has never been corrected, maybe even the opposite. He gets out of jail, works in a shoe store and meets Nicole, the number one person for him for the rest of his life. His life outside of jail is one of drugs, violence and a lot of drinking, until one day he brutally kills two people. He is then sentenced to get the death-penalty, which had a moratorium for few years. Even though many groups like the ACLU try to stop this he actually wants to get the Death Penalty. The last pages are excrusiating, does he get it or not?

Gary Gilmore was a menace, not a nice person who kept drinking and making other people's lives miserable. I had to be really careful not to feel some kind of sympathy for him however. Was het a victim of society and/or the prison system? In the end I actually was hoping he would not die.

The lives of the other people around him are also masterfully told. From his immediate family to the lawyers that came in later.

This book is great of you want a book about average Americans, about the legal system, the Death Penalty and interestingly enough also the Mormon Church.
It may be more than a 1000 pages but every one is worth it. The chapters are short and also divided into smaller parts. Because of the writing style you can put it away for a few days and pick it up again.

Rating:
Summary: Letting a killer off the hook?
Review: It's been approximately 35 years since this book was originally published. In the interim, the public has seen many men executed, some clearly worse than Gary Gilmore, including Ted Bundy and Timothy McVeigh. This is an interesting book because it really gets down and dirty with Gary Gilmore and the people who tried to help him. I fear, however, that it largely lets Gary Gilmore himself off the hook, allowing him to blame everyone but himself for his conduct in gunning down two very good men for absolutely no reason at all.

People who are alive are far more compelling and far more sympathetic than people who are dead. This is a rather sad fact of life for people who investigate and prosecute homicides. The killers, in all of their living and breathing technicolor glory, become the central figures in the drama of a murder case, while their victims lay forgotten. In attempting to illuminate Gary Gilmore and the forces at work inside of him, Normal Mailer makes Gary Gilmore the sympathetic main character in the drama that became The Executioners Song.

Only one example of this phenomenon is in the treatment of the Gary/Nicole "love story." Nicole, a nineteen-year-old, much-abused woman child, surrendered everything to the much older man (Gilmore was in his thirties) who claimed to love her. Gilmore, in return, attempted to kill her by manipulating her into a nearly successful suicide attempt. Gilmore's desire to possess Nicole was so great that he was unable to bear the thought that she might be capable of finding happiness without him. There was nothing loving about Gilmore's relationship with Nicole -- he sought, not to love her, but to subjugate her. When he realized that she would live on after his removal from society, and that his hold over her could be broken, he manipulated her into the suicide attempt as the ultimate expression of his total domination over her. And yet, many of the characters profiled in the book appear to accept the notion that the relationship between Gary and Nicole was that of star-crossed lovers (sort of a Western Romeo and Juliet) rather than that of sociopath and victim.

Gary Gilmore was a classic sociopath. He was incapable of caring for anyone other than himself. His decision to allow his execution was a calculated and self-centered one, and had little to do with remorse for the murders he committed. He realized that he would be unable to escape his fate, which, at best, would consist of a life in prison. He desired immortality, which he received in execution.

Read this book. It's interesting. But never forget that Gary Gilmore was not an epic hero who fell victim to circumstances beyond his control. The victims in this book are truly the very good and somewhat simple people surrounding Gilmore who were manipulated and used by him, as well as the two men he murdered. It's worth reading if only to try to understand how this sociopath manipulated those around him, beginning with his friends and lovers and ending, eventually, with his lawyers, the court, and the media.

Remember, though, that the story that we read is not necessarily the unvarnished truth, because it is based, at least in part, on interviews provided by Gary Gilmore, a man congenitally incapable of truthfulness. To some extent, we know what he wanted us to know, and nothing more.


Rating:
Summary: Haunting Work by a Great Writer
Review: Just re-read this book after a long layoff, it has lost none of its power in the interim. The simplicity of the writing is beautiful; Mailer stays out of the way and lets the story tell itself. This is more than a book about a crime; it is the story of people and how they relate to one another. There is great distance and extreme closeness, and there is evil and stupidity and poignance. This book leaves an impact on the psyche. If you have not read it, you are missing out on a landmark.

Rating:
Summary: Life and crimes of Gary Killmore...I mean Gilmore
Review: Mailer writes with the unembellished style of a newspaper reporter in this work which traces Gilmore's actions from his last prison release to his long-awaited execution. No detail is left out and no stone unturned, resulting in what is, at times, a jumbled panoply of lawyers, deal-making, press attention, and family dysfunction. Throw in a miserable 'love story' between two self-absorbed and selfish individuals, and you have yourself a Pulitzer Prize winner.

It's hard to keep track and stay interested when the plot and focus of the novel turns from Gilmore to the circus of press, lawyers, movie directors, and judges surrounding him. Here's a selfish, cold-blooded, vile murderer and sociopath who commands the attention and admiration of the press and the nation because he's to be the first person executed in the US in 20 years and because he welcomes the sentence. Well big deal....

I really feel for the families of Benny Bushnell and Max Jensen, who had to endure seeing their loved ones' killer on tv, on magazine covers, sought out for interviews and having movies made about him while little attention was paid to the victims. What a shame!

Quantity surpasses quality in this novel, if you ask me. Less is more...I say this NOT because I dislike long novels, but because a lot of the minutia details in the novel don't contribute much to the overall story , are simply distracting, and although it shows what a huge effort was made in writing the novel, it adds little entertainment or educational value to the book. For example, do we really need to know about Lawrence Schiller's flight schedule and his relationship with his girlfriend? Or Gary's former cellmate's medical troubles? Those are just a few examples...extraneous rambling in a novel of otherwise great import which is just unnecessarily long.

Rating:
Summary: conjecture can be tiresome
Review: mr mailer's style of writing using conjecture to create moments in time in gary gilmore's life left me uninterested. the purpose, im sure was to lead the reader to the cause of the killer's actions but it did not work for me as I found the style of writing non-absorbing and too much of a drag to get through. I put the book down after 100 pages or so.

Rating:
Summary: A must read.
Review: Normally, once I read a paperback I pass it on for others to read. I have enough books in my house that I don't normally hang onto any paperbacks. This book is the one exception. I wouldn't part with it.

Mailer delivers a top notch story about a true event. Gary Gilmore is not the type of person I think I would ever want to invite home, but I had definite mixed feelings about his execution. I was glad he got what he wanted, I agree that justice was served, but I also feel it was the waste of what might have been a valuable life. Of course, all life is valuable and Gilmore killed two young promising men. As you can tell, this book left me with some conflicting feelings.

Mailer gives us an unvarnished picture of the events that lead to Gilmore's execution. The development of the many characters is convincing, believable and in-depth. Unlike many true life stories, Mailer writes the book so that it reads like fiction. There are some instances of courtroom-like dialogue but the majority of this massive book flows like fiction. A fine example that life can be more interesting than the best fiction, but it takes a great author to do it.

Rating:
Summary: harrowing, brilliant...the best true crime I've encountered
Review: Norman Mailer's book is easily the best of the more than one hundred true crime books I've ever read. The story of Gary Gilmore & Nicole Baker reads like a warped American Romeo & Juliet at times, albeit a white trash version of sorts. When all was said and done, Gilmore had spent 18 of his 36 years institutionalized in one form or another. So Gary fought the state of Utah when they sentenced him to death in 1976. The twist is that he had to fight to make them follow through with their threat. Gilmore, as well as anyone, knew what prison was like and that he wanted nothing more to do with that kind of life.

This is one of the feww 1,000+ page books that left me wanting more when it was over. Mailer had access to virtually everyone necessary to pull off this monumental undertaking. The narrative is basically stripped of needless frills and the author's opinions are held in check beautifully when you consider the inflammatory nature of the subject matter. Mailer also does an admirable job of allowing Gilmore's victims to appear as human beings, not merely as props used by Gilmore to achieve immortality and release.

This book has the potential to spark debate on a variety of newsworthy issues, such as prison reform, victim's rights, incarceration vs. education, the death penalty as a deterrent, right to die, etc.. Gilmore's case was remarkable in regard to American Justice as we now know it. Gilmore himself was a complex and fascinating individual with underdeveloped emotional control and virtually no social skills to speak of. He developed into adulthood in legal institutions and was woefully unprepared for life outside prison walls.

Mailer does not flinch or miss a single beat. He simply tells the story of Gary Gilmore and the story of the lives touched and/or destroyed by Gilmore. He does not take any obvious liberties to fit the story to match his own beliefs. I was not a Mailer fan until I read this book. It is one of the five best books I have ever had the priveldge of reading.

The movie of the same title did Gilmore a serious injustice. Yes, he was certainly a thief and a murderer, there's no overlooking that, but he was also an extremely intelligent and artistic man. I also recommend reading Shot In The Heart, by Mikal Gilmore(Gary's younger brother). It is a beautifully written book that fills in a lot of blanks and generally helps to complete the Gilmore story.