'He is a genuine original, working against the grain of most of his contemporaries' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
'Compiling an anthology of one's own work can be a tricky business. Norman Mailer, of course, first committed this act of literary cannibalism back in 1959, when he assembled a brilliant collage of stories, journalism, essays, and poetry, Advertisements for Myself . Now, 50 years after the publication of his first novel, Gore Vidal's favourite sparring partner has put together another, more massive anthology, advertising not only himself but what we might call (paraphrasing Frost) his lover's quarrel with American life. Over the course of years, Mailer writes in his foreword, most of us compose in the privacy of our minds a social and cultural history of the years through which we have passed. True enough. But Mailer's history of the American Imperium has always been public-- extremely public--and in The Time of Our Time he attempts to get it all into a single book.
Surely this sense of himself as the republic's recording angel accounts for the structure of Mailer's anthology: rather than arranging the excerpts by date of composition, he groups them by the historical era they describe. His 1963 polemic about the Bay of Pigs fiasco, for example, appears alongside his cloak-and-dagger reconstruction of the same event from Harlot's Ghost (1991). Fiction and fact lie cheek
