Most true crime novels fetishize the crime itself. The moment of violence, when psychology, circumstance, and opportunity converge and something horrible happens; it engenders a macabre curiosity. How could someone do something like that? Inevitably, we return to the normative beliefs that can shield us from the most gruesome of crimes. To wit: everybody’s got free will, and some of us are fucked in the head, and a fraction of the fucked-in-the-head commit awful crimes. When you read an account of one of these incidents, it’s granular, anecdotal stuff, suggesting a statistical fluke and a singular nature.
Norman Mailer, in The Executioner’s Song, takes a different route. It’s the story of Gary Mark Gilmore, who in 1976, murdered two men on consecutive days. He ordered them to lie on the floor, then pressed his gun’s muzzle to their scalps, and pulled the trigger. Horrific as it is, the crime serves not as the climax of the story, but rather its catalyst. In the scope of this 1,000 page beast, Mailer sets the crime scene just 230 in. After the second murder, Gilmore is swiftly apprehended; at his trial, all the evidence weighs against him. How, then, does Mailer fill another 700 pages? He does it by examining the societal web Gilmore was at the center of. In that web, there’s dozens of people, and between each person there’s a connection; some strong, some perverse. Gilmore snipped his connection with his victims Benny Bushnell and Max Jensen, cut them out of the web altogether, and while that deep injustice outrages many of the books “characters,” Mailer himself refuses to weigh them as heavier than any other of Gilmore’s relationships. So Gilmore’s interactions with his uncle Vern, or his tragic love for Nicole Baker, matter, Mailer claims, just as much as the bloody murders. By drawing such a comprehensive picture of a community, Mailer tackles a fundamental problem of the genre, that is: how can you make people empathize with a monster?
Gilmore is at the center of things, but he’s a hollow core. Artistically gifted, widely read, and possessing an IQ of 130, Gilmore is described by shrinks as a classic sociopath. He lacks empathy, and this lack permits him to do evil. Mailer, then, seeks to do what God (forgive the theism — this book is set in the seriously religious Utah, and Gilmore himself thought deeply about the afterlife) never did: make him whole. This is Mailer’s best instinct. He never exploits our macabre curiosity, and instead chooses to engage the best parts of us, the most humane and generous. His technique for rounding out this empty man is to show his interactions with all the people he affected. It’s classic storytelling — action reveals character. Once we see how Gary deals with all these people, we find our own footing with him. What we discover is troubling. Unlike in those other accounts of infamous criminals, Gary Gilmore is not an outlier, a fiendish deviant we can chalk up to statistical aberration and forget about. Though it’s left ambiguous, Gilmore himself strenuously denies any maltreatment by his mother, or the sort of childhood trauma that would allow the psychoanalysts to discount what he did. “He was exactly like everyone else,” his brother Frank says at his funeral.
Actually, Frank says a little more than that, so I’ll present the full quote:
“… the Gary Gilmore that I knew, was both good and bad, like everyone else. That is what I remember most about Gary Gilmore, that he was exactly like everyone else, when he was young before teh law reformed Gary Gilmore, yes, before the law reformed Gary Gilmore, he was like everyone else. To make a long story short, we are gathered here today, because the law reformed Gary Gilmore.”
Here, Mailer’s holding up the mirror to all of us, and asks the question: to what degree did we serve as accomplices in Gilmore’s murders?
Our entire justice system is predicated on the notion of free will. The plaintiff chooses to violate the rights (as determined by society at large) of his or her victims, and the judge metes out punishment accordingly. If you let the frankly dangerous thought of determinism creep in, you might as well throw out the whole legal system. Why punish someone for something they had no control over? Mailer won’t be so glib as to suggest this wasn’t Gilmore’s fault, but is more than willing to take a long hard look at the penal system which could produce such a man. Sent to “reform” school at 14, and spent half his life in a cage. Underwent all the torments of prison, the fights, the rape, was even subjected to a drug called Prolixin, a pharmaceutical equivalent to a lobotomy. If you prescribe to a pretty even nature/nurture split, you can see the dangers of spending your formative years raised by the other wolves. And the more you favor environment as responsible for personality, the more you see Gilmore was doomed. That’s what makes this a tragedy, the sense of fatality.
So that’s where Mailer succeeds. But, like Gilmore, like everybody else, the novel is both good and bad. The dichotomy is neatly reflected in the book, which is actually two books stapled together: Western Voices, which documents everything up to the sentencing, and Eatern Voices, which deals with the media circus surrounding Gilmore’s execution. In keeping with the good and bad split, the Western Voices are much more interesting than the Eastern, and even with Mailer’s colloquial style, the book bogs down in the back stretch.
(His colloquial style also creates some clunky sentences, some reaching a Dan Rather type folksiness that just jars you. Describing Gilmore’s stare as a look “that could blister paint,” is good. Saying “you could feel the anger radiating off him like a heated iron skillet” is not.)
From what I can tell, the problem is Larry Schiller. Schiller bought up the film and book rights to Gilmore’s story, and contracted Mailer to write the book. Since Mailer broadened his scope to include the trial’s aftermath, we’re embroiled in the tedious details of Schiller’s struggle to lock up exclusive rights and win the respect of his fellow journalists, who see him as a carrion bird looking to make a buck off Gilmore’s death. The Executioner’s Song seems, in some ways, a vindication of Schiller. Of course, Mailer and Schiller were friends, so this seems a conflict of interest. Besides, time spent on Schiller is time spent away from the story’s principals, Gary and Nicole, whom Mailer spent 500 pages working hard to make us care about. Gary’s narrative of life and death, right and wrong, love and hate… it’s all so rich and complicated. Schiller’s more sordid quest is one of money and media, and Mailer aggravates things by pairing it with the legal storyline which, the trial over, has now moved into the red tape stage, with Writs and Stays and appeals granted or denied left and right. It’s all tedious stuff, and Mailer introduces us to a parade of attorneys and activists who get a quick physical description and a little pagetime, so many that you see a name like Toni and have to think ten seconds before realizing you last saw her six hundred pages ago.
But Mailer brings it all home for the inevitable execution, when our many characters are devastated by the state-sanctioned execution of one murderer. It highlights the value of human life, that you can even get choked up about a killer’s death, and just drives home how goddamn sad the whole situation is. While it’s three hundred pages too fat, The Executioner’s Song hurts you, makes you feel all raw and scraped out.
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