Mailer's talent was never as big as his ego

A fitfully brilliant journalist, an indifferent novelist, Norman's noisy ambitions outstripped his achievement

Not backward in coming forward ... Mailer addressing an anti-war rally in New York in 1966. Photograph: Dave Pickoff/AP

Norman Mailer died this past weekend, as anyone who has glanced at the morning papers or listened to the radio or television will know. The obituaries and commentaries have been extravagant, which seems appropriate for a life lived so extravagantly.

Mailer said he wanted to write a novel that "Dostoyevsky and Marx, Joyce and Freud; Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler; Faulkner, and even old moludering Hemingway might come to read." He never did this, of course. Who could?

The odd thing about Mailer was that he was never at heart a novelist but a remarkably gifted journalist. As a young man, I read The Naked and the Dead (1948) with deep admiration for its epic sweep, the passion and occasionally brilliance of the writing. Barbary Shore (1951) and The Deer Park (1955) left me cold, as they did most reviewers. I tried, without success, to push through Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967). I did so because I liked the image of Mailer: the literary hipster with a good deal of bravado, the outsider, the man who dared to tell society what its faults were. I admired the vast ambition. But it seemed to me he was not much of a novelist.

With thousands of others (including Mailer), I marched on the Pentagon in 1967. This was one of the first major anti-Vietnam marches, and I remember eagerly buying Armies of the Night (1968), Mailer's compelling account of that protest. I was, however, dismayed by the focus on himself: the Vietnam War was not about him. The apparent attempt to become Walt Whitman, who celebrated himself, seemed false: Whitman's ego was not about Whitman; he identified with the common man. He suggested that every atom of his body was his and the reader's as well. Mailer's ego was Mailer's alone.

Despite these misgivings, I admired the sharp portraits, the vivid evocations of the protest, his musing on the era. His extravagance here carried him a good deal of the way to greatness of a kind. It was an extravagance already found in his earlier journalism, contained in memorably books like Advertisements for Myself (1959) and Cannibals and Christians (1966). These were uneven books, but they contained some of the best writing of the period.

Mailer came into his own in the sixties and seventies, as a journalist, and probably his best work was The Executioner's Song (1979), with its bare style, its clipped reportage. It's not a very "Maileresque" book, in fact. The style doesn't seem like his. Yet it does reflect his reverence for the outlaw, his understanding of the connections between love and death. On the other hand, I have always found the idea of the "psychic outlaw" rather ridiculous - a pretentious notion that justifies bad behavior. There are too many outlaws in America, in high places - such as the White House. It's hardly a thing of beauty.

After The Executioner's Song, Mailer seemed to flounder. His novel about Egypt, Ancient Evenings (1983) was beyond bad. I had been sent the book for review; I read it, with difficulty and dismay; I quietly laid it aside. After that, I rarely read his books, although I met him several times, and had dinner with him once, finding him in private a rather sweet and friendly man, quite unlike his public persona.

Mailer sought fame, and found notoriety, finding himself in the gossip pages more than the literary pages. His excessive life - the six marriages, the stabbing of his second wife, the quarrels with public figures, the quixotic run for the mayor's job in New York, the public drinking and brawling - were good gossip, of course. In a sense, this public extravagance can be thought of as sparks from the massive flywheel of his turning life and imagination. He churned up a great deal that was marvellous, and lots that wasn't. But we should be glad that he was among us for so many years. He often made us reconsider our own lives, and his best work will continue to challenge us.

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