Pick this tome up. Read stories here and there. Leave some behind. But read on, and see how shameful it is that Mailer has fallen out of fashion. Here is the man who novelized fact, who brought you close to the soul of the subject, the matter, enlarging what was once two-dimensional; and he did it before anyone else in the post-war era. To take perhaps his most famous example, read Superman Comes to the Supermarket. And see how Mailer was not only prescient, for capturing how politics was becoming entertainment. I defy you to read any better political writing then when he begins to write about the “elusive detachment” of JFK and compares him to LBJ. And yet Mailer underestimated JFK. But FDR was underestimated by the pundits of his day. Novelists don’t need to be the most accurate pundits (hell, sadly, even pundits don’t need to be accurate). Novelists just need to be true, in the deeper sense. I think Mailer’s best writing, by far, was his non-fiction work. And yet it was so great because he was a novelist first and a reporter second. ( )