After the grandiose, obsessive longueurs of Ancient Evenings
(1983), most readers will find the opening chapter of this new
Mailer novel a relief - since it seems to promise the most
familiar, controlled sort of fiction. The narrator is Timothy
Madden, a 40-ish writer living in Provincetown, Mass., who's been
going through hell for the past 24 days, ever since his wife Patty
Lareine ran off "with a black stud of her choice." Madden ponders
his nicotine addiction, his past amours, Patty Lareine's lurid
tendencies, the Provincetown milieu; his musings are
"introspective, long-moldering, mournful" - and conventional. Soon,
however, it becomes apparent that Mailer is engaged in something of
an anything-goes improvisation - as Madden stumbles into a murky
grab-bag of black-comedy and sexual/existentialist melodrama,
teeming with echoes (send-ups?) of other writers. The prose-style,
blending vernacular and limpid poetics, often seems to be a parody
of Updike. (It comes as no surprise, about halfway through, that
Madden has written an essay on Updike's style: "He has a rare
talent. Yet it irks me.") The plot recalls Bellow, Thomas Berger,
and many others: Madden gets drunk, meets a flashy couple from
California at a bar; he wakes up semi-amnesiac the next morning,
with a tattoo; he soon discovers a decapitated woman's head in his
marijuana patch (does it belong to Patty Lareine - or the woman
from California?); eventually there are corpses everywhere, two
severed heads, revelations about rampant adultery and real-estate
greed; and all the major figures from Madden's past (his father,
his old flame Laurel, Patty Lareine's kinky ex-husband) converge
coincidentally. Meanwhile, narrator Madden - part suspect, part
sleuth - is haunted, a la John Gardner's Mickelsson's Ghosts, by
the voices of 19th-century whores. But the final chapters return to
preoccupations that are pure Mailer: violence and homosexuality as
challenges to being a tough guy - with two gay suicides, oral/anal
graphics, and Madden's confession to his macho Irish father. ("You
think I feel like a man most of the time? I don't.") Throughout,
there are chunks of great talent on display - in the sly play of
language, in the raunchy humor, in the Provincetown scenery and the
sudden flashes of raw, genuine feeling. And this short, lively
novel will certainly be read all the way through in a way that
Ancient Evenings wasn't. But it's a thin, disappointing potpourri
overall - seemingly made up as it goes along, with about equal
portions of inspiration and self-indulgence. (Kirkus Reviews)
Tim Madden, an unsuccessful writer with a penchant for nicotine,
alcohol and blondes with money, struggles towards consciousness
twenty-four days and nights after his wife has left him. He has a
bad case of alcohol amnesia, a fresh and throbbing tattoo and a car
drenched in blood. Just to make his hangover complete,
Provincetown's Chief of Police would like a quiet word... So begins
Madden's disquieting journey into the dark recesses of America's
psyche. TOUGH GUYS DON'T DANCE is Norman Mailer at his tough, raw
and uncompromising best. And Madden's tormented efforts to
reconstruct the missing hours of a terrible evening turn,
inevitably into fragments of the American Nightmare.
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