Executioner's Song is Norman Mailer's award-winning "true life novel" about the nine months between Gary Gilmore's release on parole and his eventual execution. It is an exceedingly, perhaps excessively, detailed account of those months, with all sorts of minutiae about the day-to-day lives of these people, up to and following Gilmore's shocking murders of two complete strangers one bloody evening.

The first half of the book, from Gilmore's release on parole to the killings that signal his return to prison, is an exceptional piece of creative journalism. Mailer does an extraordinary job describing the lives, beliefs, and passions of the small community to which Gilmore returns. I grew up among highly educated, fairly well-off members of the suburban middle class, so I can't say whether Mailer's portrait of small-town Utah life is accurate--but I can say that it was evocative and that it felt very real.

Even more compelling is Mailer's portrayal of Gilmore. His excavation into Gilmore's mind is one of the best arguments in favor of the death penalty that I have ever read. The portrait of Gilmore that emerges from the book is not one of the traditional raving serial killer, or of the cold-blooded psychopath (a la Hannibal Lecter). Instead, you encounter somebody much more complex, and therefore more chilling: an occasionally charming, occasionally violent, always irresponsible man full of regrets and passions but also hidden insecurities and deep, dark pools of anger. Gilmore is a frightening person not because he's violent or lunatic; he's frightening because, at a fundamental level, he's alien, unknowable to the rest of us, his true thoughts so hidden and so foreign--perhaps even to himself--that you can only watch him crawl toward his death with a sort of sick fascination. And Mailer somehow manages to get across that picture of Gilmore without once stooping to mere explanation; instead, Mailer shows us by giving us the details of Gilmore's daily life, by describing his interactions with the people around him, and by showing us the reactions of others as they brush up against this most curious of creatures.

As good as the first half of the book is, the second half really drags. While the first half of the book focused almost claustrophobically on the small circle of friends and family surrounding Gilmore, the second half breaks up into a variety of storylines: the continuing story of Gilmore's family, the tragic story of Nicole, the surprisingly adept and accurate legal story of Gilmore's appeals, the snowballing story of the media circus surrounding Gilmore, and so on. The problem is that after a while all of those stories begin replaying the same themes over and over again. The legal story and the media story become especially tiresome: the lawyers make the same motions again and again and experience the same emotions with each cycle, and the media guys go through a lot of business transactions that, frankly, are just boring. The biggest problem with the second half is that it's just so long. In terms of the narrative--and, I would imagine, in real life as well--Gilmore's eventual execution is a huge relief.

There's a bigger problem with the second half of the book though: it almost glorifies Gilmore by dwelling at such length over his protracted stay on Death Row. You know from the first half of the book that Gilmore coldbloodedly killed two decent family men by shooting them point-blank in the backs of their head. And yet somehow Mailer seems to forget all about this in the second half of the book: instead, we get extensive quotations from Gilmore's self-congratulatory letters, little asides into the depth of his love/obsession for his girlfriend, and whole subchapters dealing with Gilmore's spirituality, such as it was. The media love Gilmore; the attorneys see him as a legal entity and even as a friend; and Gilmore's family and friends are all supporters in one form or another. Only rarely does Mailer seem to step back for a second and say, Wait a minute: we're talking about a guy who shot two innocent people for no reason. It was almost unbearable to read through pages that describe how deep, how unfathomable is Gilmore's love for his girlfriend, and other such nonsense. A little of that would have been fine; too much, and it started feeling like Mailer was identifying too closely with his subject.

If you have the time and the patience, Executioner's Song is still worth a read. If you're short on both, though, I'd suggest you just read the first half leading up to Gilmore's murders. All you need to know about what happens afterward is that Gilmore was eventually executed--and the world is a better place for it.

Copyright © 2003 Steven Wu