Epilogue

Abstract

In the last three years Mailer has produced three new books* and he is shortly to publish another, The Faith of Graffiti. His two previous books, A Fire on the Moon and The Prisoner of Sex, were disappointing, I argued, because he used the space programme and women’s liberation as grist for his old satanic mills — the system of dualisms which has dominated his work since the mid-fifties. The writer who in The Armies of the Night prides himself on changing his style according to his project, who values ‘openness’ to new experience and ideas above consistency, seemed then in real danger of self-parody. Readers, critics and Mailer himself feared that his particular literary talents were being diverted into a journalistic war against the technologising of America.