Rating: 
Summary: Gary Gilmore: The Criminal As Celebrity
Review: Was I blown away by this book? No. But I read it to the end, and given that the version I read clocks in at over a thousand pages, it's a testament to the "readability" of this book.I have never read anything by Mailer before, largely because I had an enduring vision of Mailer-the-pompous-celebrity, and that image turned me off. As a 27 year old I am too old to remember a time when Mailer was anything other then a "literary lion". I decided to read "Executioner's Song" because of it's prominent role in Matthew Barney's "Cremaster Cycle". In Cremaster II, Barney assumes the role of Gilmore and Mailer himself plays the role of Harry Houdini, who might be Gary's grandfather (the father of Gilmore's father, Frank Gilmore). "Shot Through the Heart" by Mikal Gilmore (Gary's younger brother" was a book I read back in college, so before picking up Executioner's Song, I already had a thorough familarity with the outlines of the Gilmore story. The plot is easy enough to summarize: Career criminal gets out of prison after thirteen year sentence, falls in love, breaks up with girlfriend, commits a pair of senseless murders and then refuses to appeal, becoming the first man executed in America in over a decade. Over four hundred pages of the book deal with the story from the perspective of Lawrence Schiller, a Hollywood Impressario who decided to lock up the rights to Gilmore's story. As I waded through the hundred's of pages dealing with Schiller's struggles, I dealt with a variety of emotions. At first, I was angry, but by the end of the book, I realized that the detailed exploration of the exploitation of Gary Gilmore is really at the heart of this book. Mailer really focuses the book on the effect that Gilmore's decision to force the hand of the state has on those around him. As a criminal defense attorney, I was tickled by the ACLU types who tried to halt the execution without the permission of Gilmore. Truly, that was a time when America as a culture had not routinized the taking of human life. I found the most compelling writing to be contained in the first five hundred pages, as Gilmore is realized from prison and attempts to constuct a life. His description's of a man out of balance bring into question the efficacy of volition in the face of destiny. The more one reads Gilmore's own thoughts, the more it becomes clear that he was destined to spend his life in prison. That he transcended prison and gained lasting immortality by making the choice to die at the hand of the state is something that any casual fan of American pop-culture should consider at length. At times, Mailer draws direct parallels between Gilmore and celebrity culture, such as when Gilmore, the night before his execution, greets Johnny Cash with the question, "Is this the real Johnny Cash?" This is a resonance that is also at the heart of Barney's Cremaster Cycle. In the words of critic Nancy Spector, the story of Gary Gilmore represents, "The emancipatory potential of moving backward in order to escape one's destiny." (Spector, Only the Perverse Fantasy Can Still Save Us, in the Cremaster Cycle, p. 36)
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