A BIG BOOK WITH A STRONG FEELING: JOEL DICKER'S DISAPPEARANCE OF STEPHANIE MAILER

 

In 1994, a brutal quadruple-murder shook the seaside resort town of Orphea, in the tony Hamptons on Long Island. The body of a jogger was found in the road outside a house; inside the house the mayor, his wife and young son all lay dead. Two young state troopers cracked the case, and in a car chase drove the killer off a bridge into a river, where he died, a presumed suicide.

Twenty-five years later, one of the those troopers, Jesse Rosenberg, is about to retire. He's now a captain, known as Captain 100%, for his perfect record in solving cases. But his retirement reception gets crashed by journalist Stephanie Mailer, who tells Jesse that he is, in fact, Captain 99%. He did not solve the biggest case, the one that made his career, and enigmatically, she says he failed to see what was right in front of his eyes. She leaves and tells him she will see him later. But she doesn't. That night, she disappears.

The Swiss writer Joel Dicker's follow-up to The Truth About The Harry Quebert Affair is, at first glance, a complex locked-room (or locked village) mystery, in which the stories of twenty years past are revisited and opened up to new examination. But in reality, it is a digging into character: a series of character sketches whose interaction centers on the crime, and whose changes come about as information is discovered and revealed. In a sense, this creates a story-telling dilemma, in terms of what information to release to the reader, and when to it. From the point of view of the classic locked-village mystery, this can be a fault, as sometimes that which is withheld would seem normal to have appeared much earlier by the process of natural selection.

But Dicker has avoided that trampling over the basic whodunit puzzle, with the aim of revealing more about the characters, through the nifty way the novel is structured, with multiple flashbacks and multiple points of view. These intertwine: Jesse's own very unusual upbringing, and his first love Natasha, for whom he pines, have their own impact on the tale, while the former police chief, Kirk Hayward who has moved out to Hollywood and written a play which supposedly will reveal the name of the true killer—a situation which does create more mystery but also makes one wonder about the sense of realistic policing (and indeed realistic murdering!) once the play becomes the focus of the town's theatre festival, the high point of its tourist season.

“I wanted to try something different,” Dicker said during his virtual UK book launch. “I wanted a challenge, to write a choral book with lots of characters and sub-plots. But this is Orphea—and Orpheus was, of course, all about not looking back, which is a great irony. Before Chief Hayward's play, the festival's production was going to be Uncle Vanya; despite Jesse and Natasha's backgrounds in Russian it's hard to see parallels between Vanya and the situation in Orphea except for one, perhaps: in Vanya happiness seems to be something that eludes us in this life. It's interesting that Dicker's characters all seem to be chasing some kinds of unachievable happiness, but in his ending Dicker plays further with that. His approach to the book echoes some of this: “it can work like a crime novel,” he said, “investigation becomes like a guide, a path you follow to the characters.”

Dicker said he chose the name Stephanie Mailer partly out of connection with Norman Mailer. “I create a character before I give the name,” he explained, and when I thinking of the town I wanted to have a lake called Deer Lake, which reminded me of Mailer's novel, The Deer Park. It was that simple. Or not quite, because in the translation, from the French, Deer Lake becomes Stag Lake, so the Mailer connection disappears!

The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer is a big book, with a deep cast of characters and a plot woven through two decades. There are multiple twists before the end, but the real pleasure may come from the construction itself, like a play (perhaps Chekhov's The Wood Demon?) with a big cast, an expansive set, and a sea of revelations. Talking with Dicker, I mentioned my favourite Swiss writers, Jacques Chessex and Friedrich Durrenmatt, both of whom used the framework of the crime novel to investigate issues of both character and society. Both, however, worked primarily in shorter books. “Yes,” he said, “a book is what we see before we read; a big book may scare the reader but give a very good feeling to have finished. A short book is a strong feeling.” What Dicker has produced is a big book, but with a strong feeling.

The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer by Joel Dicker

translated by Howard Curtis; MacLehose Press £20.00 ISBN9780857059208

this review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

PHILIP ROTH: MY LAST WORD ESSAY

My essay about Philip Roth went out yesterday on the BBC Radio 4 obituaries programme Last Word. You can find it on the IPlayer here (it's the second item on the running order). When I pitched it to the programme the piece was titled "Philip Roth And The Great American Novel", but I was then asked to make it a bit more of an obituary: the extra material required some cutting, but it still ran a bit long. The producer, Neil George, had found the quotes he'd like to include; one of them as it happened, I'd already written into the script. He re-ordered a little of the material, and cut a few bits. But it worked nicely, I thought, as it was broadcast.

What follows is the final original script, with the obituary-additions included. I've marked some of the bits that didn't make the final cut in brackets. There were also some things I either cut from my first draft or didn't include because it was not a literary essay, or the discussion would have run too long, so I've included them as footnotes.

PHILIP ROTH AND THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL

Philip's Roth's literary career coincides nicely with my own adult reading life, and it was probably with adult reading in mind that sometime in 1969 I grabbed a copy of Portnoy's Complaint, his first book whose explicit frankness about sex, especially masturbation, made it a huge best-seller. It was also funny, but as a teen-aged student of literature I was not impressed. As the son of a Jewish mother myself, it may have cut too close to the  bone. (Audio: from Portnoy)

Soon after, I saw the film Goodbye Columbus, and went back to read Roth's 1959 novella which inspired the movie. Again funny, but also a sharp-edged dissection not just of Jewish families, but of the American Dream they pursued. It's about assimilation, snobbery, money and its uses. About the class structure of education and its value. It reflected Roth's own childhood in Newark's Jewish Weequahic section, contrasted with the ritzy suburb of Short Hills. And it's about love and sex. You didn't need a Jewish mother like mine to see how Neil Klugman and Brenda Patimkin's relationship was doomed. (1)  (Audio: Roth on GC).

In 1973 Roth published The Great American Novel. It wasn't. Set it the world of baseball, it wasn't even the Great Baseball Novel; {Bernard Malamud, Mark Harris and especially Robert Coover had beaten him to that}. But in its exuberance and self-conscious over-kill it was parodic comment on the burden of what Norman Mailer called 'the great bitch on one's shoulder', that feeling that any American writer, to be 'great' had to write THE book. Mailer battled the ghosts of Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald, but even  conceded Moby Dick was American writing's Great White Whale. Roth seemed to be saying he would not chase that whale. And Joseph Heller had already written Catch 22. (2)

{Roth's Jewish comic act, a harsher Woody Allen, became less captivating}. (3) Critics castigated him as a self-hating Jew, pigeon-holing him in a literary ghetto. But his characters, striving for assimilation, transcended that. I could see easily, in Roth's Jewish fathers, echoes of my own Swedish dad, like Roth's the son of immigrants. Roth left Newark to attend the Waspy (white Anglo-Saxon protestant), Bucknell Colege. He went on to the University of Chicago, then became one of the first products of university writing programmes. (4)

He used the material of his life, and the lives of those he knew, as grist for his mill. His unhappy first marriage to Margaret Martinson; her tragic death later in a car crash. He was a novelist. He wrote. His writing, for better or worse, came first, subsumed his life.In the Seventies he created a fictional alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman and retreated into solipsism, taking his scalpel to writing itself. He never sought public acclaim, like Mailer or Gore Vidal; he didn't deal in journalism. But didn't The Great American Novel need to address a stage bigger than the writer's office or the neighbour's wife's bedroom? (5)

In The Counterlife in 1986, something changed. Roth took apart a story about Zuckerman, and told it from myriad angles. It seemed to free him to unleash Sabbath's Theatre, a bravura celebration of his own so-called faults. It won him his second National Book Award 35 years after Goodbye Columbus.

He was 62. In the space of 15 years he published 11 consistently fine novels. (6) When Fitzgerald said there were no second acts in American life, he could not have imagined this unprecedented run of autumnal success. The themes were familiar, his life was still material. His turbulent marriage to the actress Claire Bloom led to her writing a memoir, which Roth answered with vitriol in I Married A Communist. But he was also looking outward. In Operation Shylock the self-hating Jew turned the story of a Philip Roth impersonator in Israel into a riff on Jews making Europe great again. 

But the more he got away from himself, the better he got. In American Pastoral, his greatest novel, he created Swede Lvov, an answer of sorts to his almost exact contemporary John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom. The Swede's success in pursuing the American Dream gets tragically ambushed by the Sixties. I recognised Swede's daughter Merry as an alternate world version of Brenda Patimkin; I'd known women like her. Then In The Plot Against America, Roth created an alternate America, which many now see a prophetic.

Sex, Death and America are the great themes of American literature; Roth now wove them together. He transcended his own story, but that 'big book' never came. I don't think he intended it to. But to my great surprise and pleasure, his late novels Indignation and The Humbling came full circle back to the America of Goodbye Columbus, as if it were unchanged, except the writer. (7) And his final book, Nemesis, returned to the days when polio threatened, randomly, as death always does, all of us children.

No writer prepared us so well for his passing. (Audio: Roth on retirement) Announcing his retirement, Roth said he'd like one last big idea. But he didn't need a Great American Novel as validation. Nor a Nobel Prize, after Bob Dylan pipped him (8). As he also said, he'd done the best he could with what he had. And that was great in itself.

Footnotes

(1) You could tell by the casting! Richard Benjamin gets Ali MacGraw? Get outta here. The same year she played Jewish here, McGraw also played Italian in Love Story, which subsumed Goodbye Columbus. But this time Waspy Ryan O'Neil gets the ethnic girl. So she dies. Mike Nichols should have directed Goodbye Columbus.
(2)  I left out the comment on other baseball novels because it was off-topic, but you really should read Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, which was published in 1968 and which I am sure influenced Roth's book. I'm also sure Roth's book was a parody, not of the literature itself, as much as the quest. It's better than many people affect to believe. He throws a lot in, like Melville, but the Patriot League isn't quite the Pequod. But I don't think he was actually trying to write TGAN; though most of the critics assumed he was. I also don't believe he came close in those early years. Also, I'm not saying Catch 22 actually is the Great American Novel, though it may be the best of its generation. 

(3) The Roth/Allen comparison is obvious: Roth was a novelist who used Jewish comedy, Allen a comic who wrote stories as well as writing and directing movies. We could argue for pages about which came first, Roth's novel The Breast or the breast section of Allen's movie Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (both in 1972). Certainly Portnoy had opened the door. But there's another link: Richard Benjamin. Actually Mia Farrow. After breaking up with Woody, Mia 'dated' (as they say) Roth--their houses in Connecticut were probably not that far apart. Mia then published a memoir of her own, shades of Claire Bloom. That year, Woody's film Deconstructing Harry, a more vicious and Jewish riff on Bergman's Wild Strawberries  featured a Philip Roth-like novelist who makes barely disguised fiction out of his life. And Benjamin, who starred in the movie of Portnoy's Complaint as well as Goodbye Columbus, got cast as one of Harry's alter-ego characters, Allen's version of Roth's Zuckerman if you will. Meow.

(4) Roth taught at a number of the early creative writing programmes, and his early stories (which as best I can see have never been collected) appeared in literary magazines (and political ones like Commentary) before making the jump to Esquire and the New Yorker.

(5) One could try an essay on the way creative writing programmes tend to write about writers and teachers somewhat disproportionately and how Roth reflects this. 

(6) This was the hardest part of the essay to write. I'm convinced about the turning point, but the next two books Deception and Shylock, are really still working out bits of The Counterlife. It may have just been aging, the acquisition of gravitas. Look at the contrast in his photos. Up to this point I'd agree with those who find Roth's work repetitive, not challenging, very much inward looking. It had its moment. But starting with Sabbath's Theatre I'd argue each of his novels is brilliantly controlled (even the seeming chaos of Sabbath's, and his status as a major writer (as opposed to one known for Portnoy) is cemented by them.

(7) Indignation is a campus novel, set in the early 50s, with all the class differences and sexual double-standards of Goodbye Columbus. Although The Humbling offended some readers when its aging actor protagonist has an affair with the lesbian daughter of two of his friends, the way 'Mike', the woman, feels compelled to hide the relationship from her parents reminded me one last time of Brenda Patimkin. I also didn't address the misogyny of which Roth stands accused. Here the accusation might be 'self-hating man', because he is so straight-forward about the men's weakness and fear of women, and the way it is inculcated in them. This may be a more generous analysis than some would give.

(8) First Arthur Miller, then Roth. Though I'm not sure his world view is Nobelesque, in the sense of the kind of idealism Alfred sought, but then, was Pinter's? I wonder if Joni Mitchell will pip Margaret Atwood?

TOM WOLFE AND AMERICAN STUDIES

Although Tom Wolfe was in many ways the poster boy for 'The New Journalism', and appreciations of him focused on his revolutionary writing style, Wolfe's classic journalism, and indeed his fiction, was informed equally by the unlikely fact that he had earned a PhD at Yale University in the then-newish field of American Studies. During the war, Yale's American History department was the prime recruiting source for the OSS, and after the war the American Studies programme, concerned less with history than with American civilization, appears to have been no different for the CIA. Rather than go into academe, Wolfe went to work on the Springfield (Mass) Union, then straight to the Washington Post and reporting from revolutionary Cuba. Connect the dots.

American Studies would appeal to the CIA, who were funding all sorts of arts and literary projects, trying to establish the value of American life. Wolfe's doctoral thesis was on the CPUSA's Depression-era League Of American Writers, and in later years Wolfe would link the sociological concerns of his writing to his study of Max Weber's 'Status Theory', an interesting combination for a writer who was anything but leftish. But it's easy to see its fruits at the heart of a couple of the early pieces that made his name. The most famous are 'Radical Chic', about the conductor Leonard Bernstein's cocktail party for the Black Panthers, and 'Girl Of The Year', about society wild child Baby Jane Holzer. Were you to read only these, you might picture Wolfe, the Southern Dandy dressed in trademark planter couture, solely as a gadfly in the social scene, a reportorial version of Gore Vidal or even Truman Capote.

Where many of the so-called new journalists got involved with the people they wrote about, making the story about themselves as much as their subjects, Wolfe remained apart. Instead, he used his prose style to draw the reader in, as if in place of himself, recreating on the page that feeling of 'being there', as Jerzy Kosinsky would say.

But what gave Wolfe's work its muscle was not socio-economic analysis, nor typographic FLAMBOYANCE!!!,  but the mythic aspect of American literature which he gleaned in his studies: the way the American hero, 'hard, isolate, stoic and a killer' in D.H. Lawrence's words, was self-made, tested as an individual, and fleeing from the encroachments of avaricious society. In Wolfe's eyes, Junior Johnson, the stock-car racer who learned his trade evading Federal agents while carrying his father's bootleg whisky to market, was indeed 'The Last American Hero'.

Although not actually the last. For Wolfe he was the forerunner of Chuck Yeager, the test-pilot with the Right Stuff. Just as Johnson was subsumed by the growth of corporate NASCAR racing, so Yeager gave way to corporate NASA, who insisted on total control of their astronauts.

This vanishing American hero (to use Leslie Fiedler's phrase) recurs in variations even as Wolfe reports on America civilization becoming a more and more bizarre beacon for the rest of the world. I was still in my early teens when I devoured The Kandy Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby (1965), his first collection. The title story is about two car-customizers, Ed 'Big Daddy' Roth and George Barris 'King of the Kustomizers'. As a kid I knew nothing about Baby Jane Holzer, but despite having only slightly more interest in cars, I devoured the pictures of hot rods in Rod & Custom magazine, built plastic models of Big Daddy's cars like the Beatnik Bandit. Wolfe's story is about the way Kustom Kulture in Kalifornia seeks a freedom unavailable in, say, Detroit, or even New York. It's also about the battle between designers, one creating art without thought to functionality, the other building artistic works one could actually drive. It's a theme repeated in Wolfe's 1981 polemic against modern architecture, From Bauhaus to Our House.

In 1965 I was already listening to the disc jockey Murray the K on 1010 WINS in New York. Wolfe's essay 'The Fifth Beatle' portrayed Murray less as a leader of the nascent counter culture than a frenzied self-promoter, the 'king of the hysterical disc jockies' , though those of us who listened knew the hysterical crown actually belonged to 'Cousin' Brucie Morrow, whom Murray replaced on WINS. Ironically, two decades later, after the publication of Bonfire, first serialised in Rolling Stone, Norman Mailer called Wolfe 'the hardest-working show-off in the literary world', in effect a novelistic Murray the K. The ensuing feud with what Wolfe called 'my Three Stooges', Mailer, John Updike and John Irving concerned the quality of his fiction, which Wolfe self-flatteringly described in terms of the social realism of Zola, Dickens, Balzac and Dreiser. In his riposte to the Stooges, 'Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast' Wolfe argued writers should be focused on 'the material' of American life, not their own talent. Funnily, the two novelists he cited were Joseph Wambaugh and John LeCarre: early Wambaugh was everything Wolfe may have thought Bonfire to be, and a good counter to Updike, but LeCarre's spies moved in a world very much apart from the billion feet, especially the billion American feet.

Although Irving might be said to be the most self-consciously Dickensian of Wolfe's Stooges, and Updike the most obvious opposite of what Wolfe wanted to do, the feud with Mailer is paradoxical, if not in their fictions (though Mailer's mythic takes in, say, An American Dream or Why Are We In Vietnam? are as full of American Studies as Wolfe, and former originally was serialised in Esquire!) then in their non-fiction. We think of the New Journalism as being defined not only by flamboyant writing like Wolfe's, and by less flamboyant long-form, and by the insertion of the writer into the story, which was very much not Wolfe's MO. It was however, Mailer's, or did you miss the point of Advertisements For Myself? He did it in the third person (something he learned reading Henry Adams at Harvard, probably in American Studies!). Wolfe himself credited Gay Talese's 'Joe Louis At 50' as opening his eyes, while some of the new journalists, say, Jimmy Breslin, were working in the style of great columnists--bringing the freedom of the column to their reporting. The point is that, in non-fiction, this was very much a shared enterprise, without the back-biting. But when we entered into the realms of fiction, all bets were off. Could Wolfe have dug back into his own past and written anything like Mailer's vast novel about the OSS and early CIA, Harlot's Ghost (whose promised part II never appeared)? To do so might have required Wolfe's own presence; Mailer, in this case, was playing the observer.

But his critics felt the difference between Wolfe's material and his 'talent'. It goes back to Wolfe's writing his way out of the diffidence of being an observer. Perhaps there is his own element of class involved. His family had money; if he were not in the CIA he might possibly have been supported by them. In Bonfire he captured the sense of the greed-driven Eighties perfectly, his involvement with the characters almost matched the ones about which he'd reported. But that was because they were the Ivy League elite, the ones who had once gone into the CIA, and cover jobs in journalism, but now were busy being a different kind of Masters Of The Universe, by moving money and living large. But after Bonfire, away from the types he knew well, his three later novels revealed the limits of observation as opposed to creation, most famously in I Am Charlotte Simmons (2004), in which Wolfe very much wasn't his black woman from a poor background who attends an elite university. He was expanding an observation about an issue in society into a framework he was unable to fill convincingly.

Wolfe's most famous book remains The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), chronicling his travels across America on an LSD-fuelled trip with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters, including Neal Cassady and the Grateful Dead, a journey that also spawned parts of Hunter Thompson's first book, Hell's Angels. Kesey of course is best-remembered today for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (1962) a moving novel about an issue of sorts, but more tellingly a daringly-constructed and written study of an individual hero's battle with society. That was also, more obviously, the theme of Kesey's now-neglected second novel, Sometimes A Great Notion (1964), the tale of the Stamper logging family's battle against unionzed loggers in Oregon. Although it is very much rooted in realism, the characters often speak in first-person monologues, like a new journalist's patter. I think of Paul Newman, as Hank Stamper in the final scene of the film adaptation, riding down the river like Huck Finn, straight out of your American studies class, flipping a middle finger at the world.

Wolfe of course remained aloof from the merriest of the Pranksters' pranking. But it's hard not to think that in Kesey and his rebellion against the norms of Sixties society, and his return from the West to the East on his bus, Wolfe saw his most crucial themes laid out for him, in one psychedelic, tie-dyed pattern. That he could never reproduce this in his fiction should not come as a surprise. After all, after the Magic Bus, neither could Kesey.

MY MUHAMMAD ALI: BELLS AFTER FIFTEEN ROUNDS

1. When We Were Kings is the title of a superb documentary film about the Rumble In The Jungle, Muhammad Ali's classic battle with George Foreman in Zaire, where he regained the heavyweight crown. The title is fitting, because Ali's fame began in the ring, and it was a time of giants in boxing's most glamorous division. George Foreman said that he, Joe Frazier and Ali were like one person; they had been forged together in the public imagination, but there were also Sonny Liston, Floyd Patterson, Ken Norton, Henry Cooper, Ernie Terrell: men over whom Ali needed to triumph to establish himself, and men who now shine in his reflection. Watch the moment Foreman falls in the film: at ringside the writer George Plimpton is frozen in drop-jaw disbelief, Norman Mailer is already beginning to celebrate. Boxing has always drawn great writers; there is no more telling display of character, no more naked revealing of what is happening inside a man's heart, than that time in the ring, and writers and film-makers have always known that.

2. Muhammad Ali was the most important sportsman of the Twentieth Century, and would have been even had he not become the most transcendent, become a symbol for battles of conscience, for racial justice, for people far removed from power, for religious belief, for so much else. He was unquestionably the most-recognisable human being in the world; he could go virtually nowhere without being mobbed. But it started on a smaller scale. When he burst on the scene after winning his Olympic light-heavyweight gold in Rome, he brought something new to sport: showmanship and self-promotion. He carried the trash-talk of the playground and the braggadocio of the professional wrestling ring into the arenas of 'legitimate' sport.Ali's style coincided with the rise of sports television: it was the beginning of the time when sportsmen stopped being paid as competitors and began to realise TV turned them into entertainers, like movie stars. This did not mean Ali was embraced immediately or automatically. To many 'traditional' sports fans, mainly whites, he was a loud-mouth, he was uppity, he needed to be put into his place.

3. From 'I Am The Greatest', a poem by Cassius Clay: 'The fistic world was dull and weary/with a champ like Liston things had to be dreary'.

I once wrote about Sonny Liston, who before Clay might legitimately have been considered the baddest man on the planet, saying 'his only skill was hurting people'. The white audience faced severe problems trying to decide if they should root for Liston, a thug who'd learned his boxing in prison, to be the one to shut 'the Louisville Lip' up. Not that they doubted he would; he was a 7-1 favourite. Cassius Clay had irritated people calling Doug Jones 'an ugly little man' before their title eliminator in Madison Square Garden, which Clay won by decision. He spent the build-up to the fight entertaining celebrities like the Beatles (his win over Henry Cooper a few months earlier had already made him a star in Britain) who flocked to Miami; he called Liston a 'big ugly bear' and seemed so hyper at the weigh-in sportswriters claimed he was scared to near-death. Clay's victory in February 1964 shocked the world. Soon after, he announced his conversion to Islam and his name-change to Muhammad Ali. When he won the rematch with Liston in Lewiston, Maine, delayed and moved to its unlikely location because boxing politics had already stripped him of the WBA version of the title (for agreeing the rematch, rather than facing the WBA's top contender) the surprise was such that many still believe Liston took a dive, falling to the famous phantom punch.

4. Floyd Patterson may have been the first black 'white hope'. Ali beat Patterson, who had been destroyed twice in short-order by Liston, mercilessly; when the fight was stopped in the twelfth round, he had carried 'the rabbit', in order to inflict extra punishment on Floyd. It was partly for using his 'slave name' Cassius Clay, and partly because Patterson was promoted as the 'credit to his race' boxer the establishment wanted to see win. In a strange way, the beating Floyd took from Ali restored some of the respect he'd lost in his two losses to Liston, returned his place among champs. Patterson had first lost his own championship to the Swede Ingemar Johansson, then re-gained the title; my father, whose parents were Swedes, was a Floyd fan because of that. The generation gap was already apparent in our house in late 1965. Ali then beat four white fighters in a row within the space of six months in 1966: Canada's George Chuvalo, Cooper and fellow Brit Brian London, and Germany's Karl Mildenberger. By the time he'd finished, my dad was an Ali fan. Even when Ali fought the guy deemed the latest, perhaps last, Great White Hope, Jerry Quarry.

5. 'I was the onliest boxer in history people asked questions like a senator.' 

When Ali was called up for the draft in 1966, he had to be reclassified 1-A. He'd originally been judged 1-Y, fit to be called up only in times of 'national emergency' because his IQ was measured at 78, which put him in the bottom 16% of Americans; the army didn't take anyone from the bottom 30%. 'I said I was the greatest, not the smartest' he said at the time. He would belie that statement many times in the next few years. Clay was not a good student; he never was a reader. But he absorbed things he thought were necessary to learn, like a sponge, and his ability to separate what he needed to learn from what he didn't was superb. He had the charisma to make people, interviewers, great writers, all feel he was talking on their level, probably because they were more eager to be understood on his. And he could recycle old tropes, jokes, stories, and make people feel they were brand new.

     As anyone who went through the process knew at the time, draft boards are not elected bodies, nor civil service, they are made of up of local grandees who rarely sent their own sons off to war. Many people thought the timing of Ali's reclassification by the Louisville draft board, when he was already 24, was more than coincidence, because it happened just afer his contract expired with the ten influential Louisville millionaires who originally backed him, and they saw the Nation of Islam's Elijah Muhammad taking control of the fighter.

6. 'No Viet Cong ever called me nigger'. 

I write the N word here because that's what Ali said, and because how can anyone who wasn't alive at the time understand fully the depth of anguish and honesty in what he was saying if they don't hear the lash of the word? Ali failed to step forward for induction into the army in April 1967 and almost immediately had his New York State boxing license withdrawn, and was stripped of his titles. In June, a jury took only 20 minutes to convict him, and the case went to appeal and eventually to the Supreme Court. Here's how he explained it: 'what should I shoot them for? They never called me nigger. They never lynched me, they didn't put no dog on me. They didn't rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father....How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.' This made my decision to be a conscientious objector, and face the consequences, so much easier.

7. In 2014 I wrote Ernie Terrell's obituary for The Guardian:

Ernie Terrell, who has died aged 75, lost his heavyweight championship to Muhammad Ali in the infamous 'What's My Name?' fight, one of the most brutally cruel displays in boxing history. In the build-up to their match Terrell insisted on calling Ali by his 'slave name', Cassius Clay. This tactic had backfired for Floyd Patterson in an earlier loss to Ali, but because Terrell also held the WBA belt Ali felt was his, Ali was infuriated. He called Terrell 'an Uncle Tom nigger' and said 'I'll make him eat those words, letter by letter'.

     The unification fight was held in February 1967 in the Houston Astrodome, where 37,000 spectators made it the biggest indoor boxing crowd ever. In his pre-match poem, Ali talked of knocking Terrell out of the stadium in the first round: 'The ref is frantic/Terrell's over the Atlantic/Who would've thought, when they came to the fight/They'd see the launch of a coloured satellite!' 

      For 15 rounds Ali taunted Terrell as he inflicted as much damage as he could. He thumbed Terrell's left eye, and later pushed it along the ring-ropes, leaving Terrell nearly blind. By the twelfth round, Terrell was simply covering his face, and in the thirteenth Ali landed a stream of unanswered punches, but referee Harry Kessler never stopped the fight. Terrell nearly lost the sight in his eye, and was never the same fighter again. Ironically, only two months after the fight, Clay was stripped of both his titles.

      (Terrell) remained philosophical about his beating...saying, in 2009, 'We were fighting...I bore no animosity. What he say, all that, don't count. That was his way of promoting the fight'.

8. The cover story of the April 1968 issue of Esquire Magazine was called 'The Passion of Muhammad Ali', and the magazine cover created by George Lois and shot by Carl Fischer, is often considered the greatest of all time: a homage to Mantegna's 'Martyrdom Of St Sebastian', Ali in his white trunks penetrated by arrows. The issue hit the stands just as President Lyndon Johnson announced that he 'would not seek, nor shall I accept' the nomination of his party for President. It was easy to think we, young people protesting the Vietnam Nam war and the ongoing problem of racial prejudice, had won. Easy, but as it turned out, delusional.

9. While banned from boxing, Ali toured college campuses giving lectures. Sometime I believe in the spring of 1970, before the Invasion of Cambodia, shootings at Kent and Jackson State, and the student strike, I was in a packed crowd at the brand-new rink at Wesleyan, listening to Ali, and hanging around afterwards to applaud as he left by car. I honestly believe that absent Ali's visit, the lacrosse team, of which I was a part, would not have been the first group on campus to vote to join the strike. There is a clip from around that time on You Tube where Ali faces down a young critic, telling him that white folks are the enemy, not the Viet Cong. 'If I die, I'm gonna die right here fighting you,' he says. We believed him, and we somehow believed that 'white folks' didn't include us.

10. From 'I Am The Greatest' a poem by Cassius Clay: 'This kid fights great, he's got speed and endurance/If you sign to fight him, increase your insurance.'

If Ali had never become a public figure outside boxing, never revolutionised the way we saw sport, never set sportsmen free to be entertainers, he would still be an iconic figure based on the major fights he fought after his return. The enforced absence from the ring cost him some of his speed: few opponents had been able to hurt him with solid punches before. The three fights against Joe Frazier, the Rumble in The Jungle against George Foreman, the two split decisions against Ken Norton, are all engrained in my memory. Some of them I only heard on the radio, but I've since watched them over and over again, and can see the relentless Frazier plowing forward, head down, left arm low and cocked to deliver the hook that caused so much damage. I now watch the Rope A Dope strategy against Foreman and think about the courage, the intelligence, the risk Ali took. And think mostly about the long-term damage those big fights inflicted on The Champ.

11. In 1976 I was a press liason at the Montreal Forum during the boxing finals, at which both Spinks brothers won gold medals. Leon Spinks' win over Cuban Sixto Soria was the greatest amateur bout I've ever seen. In 1978 I watched Ali retake his title from Spinks, on closed circuit at the Dominion in Tottenham Court Road. It was the result I wanted, but I took no joy from it. Ali would be nearly 40 when the fifth and final loss of his career, a difficult-to-watch unanimous decision against Trevor Berbick finally convinced him to retire. He refused to believe what he thought possible might not be.

12. From 'I Am The Greatest' a poem by Cassius Clay: 'Then someone with colour, someone with dash/brought the fight fans running with cash.' 

Clay understood from the first what he was doing, and in his poem he refers to himself as a new kind of fighter, to boxing's 'New Frontier'. He claimed to have based his style on the early TV wrestling star Gorgeous George, but it's more likely he was copying 'Classy' Freddie Blassie, the self-proclaimed 'King of Men', who was big in the Louisville when Clay was young. In 1976, Ali took part in a fight with the Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki, and brought Blassie in as his manager. Watch them on the Tonight Show, guest-hosted by MASH actor McLean Stevenson. Blassie says Ali has 'the fastest feet, the fastest punch and now he's proven he's got the fastest brain too...because he hired me.' Although Ali claimed it was going to be a real fight, that was never Inoki's idea, and when Ali got to Japan negotiations as to how the fight should be scripted broke down; neither guy would do a job for the other. So we saw Inoki lying on his back in the fight, using his feet to keep Ali away; easily the least edifying moment of Ali's career. He was born to be a boxer and a performer. He became the latter through the former.

13. In 1988, working for ABC Sports, I was in Pesaro, Italy, broadcasting a middleweight title fight between Sumbu Kalambay and Mike McCallum. The night before the fight I stayed up late with the promoter Bob Arum and with Angelo Dundee, Ali's legendary trainer. I don't think I've ever heard anyone describe someone in the way Angelo did; it was somewhere between respect and worship, like a follower who had been blessed in ancient times to fight alongside a demigod. And it was sincere. I learned a lot about boxing on that trip, but I never did discover whether Angelo actually sliced Clay's gloves to buy time in the first fight against Cooper.

14. At the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 I was in charge of host broadcast coverage of basketball at the Georgia Dome. The bane of my life was any game with the US Dream Team II, because my fellow broadcasters and journalists would desperately try to get into broadcast/press seats, not working but just to see the superstars. But before the game with Angola, Ali, who of course had lighted the Olympic torch to open the games, arrived courtside. The Angolans broke off their warmups to crowd around, followed by the Dream Teamers who rushed out of their locker room to join them. Here were the world's biggest superstars turned into fan boys just like the rest of us. I walked casually down to court side, fan boy myself, just to admire the admiration.

15. Today I woke to the news Ali was gone, and listened to tributes and watched my memories gather and soar. I rummaged through some boxes and found my copy of Cassius Clay's 45, 'I Am The Greatest', b/w 'Will The Real Sonny Liston Please Fall Down'. It's more than half a century since I first heard it. This is a DJ copy I won in a college competition; on the single as released the flip side is Ali singing 'Stand By Me'. The sleeve is a bit worn, and I don't have a record player anymore, so I couldn't play it. I just looked at the pictures on the sleeve and heard the voice in my head, clear as it was when I was 12. 'This is the legend of Cassius Clay/the most beautiful fighter in the world today. He talks a great deal and brags indeedy, 'bout a tremendous punch that's incredibly speedy....If Cassius says a mouse can beat a horse, don't ask how, put your money where your mouse is...if Cassius says a cow can lay an egg, don't ask how, grease that skillet.' The world that brought that character into the spotlight no longer exists, and a great part of the reason for that is Muhammad Ali. But the shadow of those things that drew Ali to the spotlight outside of the ring, those most American clouds of race, of war, of rich and poor, still lingers over the country. It's a different country, in part because of Ali, and he was The Greatest. Grease that skillet.

Saturday 4 June 2016

NOTE: I wrote this on Saturday, and it appeared Sunday at Newstalk.com in Ireland. You can link to that here. It was billed somewhat misleadingly as a 'list of some of the landmark moments' in Ali's career, which obviously it isn't, so I thought I'd repost it here, with my original subtitle. You can also find a version, deftly shortened by London Review of Books, at the LRB Blog here. Over the weekend, there were so many great obituaries and reminiscences, and so much great writing about him while he lived, it wasn't for me to follow those who knew him. But everybody had their own responses to Ali, and these were some of mine.

 

PETER MATTHIESSEN: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the writer Peter Matthiessen is up at the Guardian's website now. You can link to it here, and it should be in the paper paper soon. I wrote it quickly, to a flexible word length. A few things were cut out, and some explanations added it, but mostly it is as I wrote it.

The most extensive loss was my second graf:

No less than his work, Matthiessen's life embodied the nature of opposites beloved in the Zen Buddhist philosophy he practised. Beyond the dichotomy of fiction and fiction, Matthiessen was able to found the pre-eminent literary journal, The Paris Review, while working for the CIA. And his journey to radical politics and alternative life-style never saw him abandon the elite New York society from which he came, right down to living in the smart east end of Long Island.

  

I felt the point about the Zen nature of his life was an important one to make, particularly because his final novel seemed so strongly to encompass opposites. And though some of the specifics are covered later in the obit (hence the cut) I actually would have liked to take a little more time to explore the contradictions in his atrician New York life style and his earthy proto-hippie explorer quality. It was something that is very American upper-class--another small item cut was my mention that while at Hotchkiss he withdrew his name from the family's listing in the Social Register; yet proceeded on to Yale, and continued to live the life-style of the elite. I also mentioned that he'd been at school with George Plimpton, a fellow founder of the Paris Review, and a close copy of Matthiessen, right down to writing for Sports Illustrated--Plimpton explored professional sports the way Matthiessen explored the natural world. They were both elegant in that strong patrician way, the kind of men who wear seersucker that never wrinkles. Perhaps my interest reflects all the time I have spent in this country!You can seen the connection when people compare those Americans to the same sort of English, more prevalent in the pre-Thatcher years than now, a sort of transcontinental Oxbridge centered on America's prep (ie: British 'public') schools and our Oxbridge of Yale and Harvard. Of course, if America were Britain, Matthiessen would have probably been presenting wildlife programmes, a la David Attenborough.

These were the men recruited for the CIA in its early days, and although the taint of having spied on his fellow expats never seemed to stick to Matthiessen, it was interesting the way he always moved to distance his magazine from his own work. Yet anyone following the funding dispersed by the CIA in that period could hardly doubt that some of it must have made its way to the Paris Review. The question inflames some people, like Elia Kazan informing on fellow-travelers, yet here it doesn't quite makes its way into Philby territory, perhaps another difference between the American faux-aristocracy and the British.

That life style is interesting too because Matthiessen's house on Long Island was a meeting place for New York's literary world, which was a potent mixture of WASPy upper crust and urban immigrant-types, mostly Jews. Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, if you please. From this mix emerged the bright world of post-war American fiction. I seem to recall reading an Esquire piece about a highly competitive softball game organised out there, but I couldn't dig up the reference.

Mathiessen was quite funny about the way Timothy Leary ruined the world of LSD for everyone, by making such a fuss the government was almost forced to make it illegal. I wanted to include Matthiessen's take on Leary, but didn't; in the end, the single mention of him went too. His trip to New Guinea in 1961, which became Under The Mountain Wall, was made with Michael Rockefeller, who later would disappear, and appears to have been killed and eaten by cannibals.

I found it interesting too that his father was awarded an OBE for his camouflage designs for merchant convoys during the war (that was cut) and that his father's cousin was F.O. Matthiessen, the legendary professor of American Studies at Harvard, whose book, American Renaissance, was one of the first and still one of the classic looks at the great writers who seem to have in part inspired Matthiessen's fiction (I didn't have space for that rumination!). The Watson trilogy might be compared to Melville or Twain, you could also mention Faulkner, Harry Crews, Cormac McCarthy, or James Carlos Blake.

But the important thing was Matthiessen's writing, and trying to explain the nature of its appeal, both to the most intense literary types and to casual readers of travel, exploration, and nature. A few British comparisons occur to me now, but although many are elegant, they are more concerned with the phenomenology of travel, not the dissection of the spirit of the natural world. In this, Peter Matthiessen was one of a kind.

JFK ASSASSINATION LITERATURE: THE OPEN BOOK ESSAY

Last week my essay on the literature of the JFK assassination was broadcast on Open Book. It's still available on IPlayer here (about nine minutes in).Because of time limitations, portions of the essay we recorded had to be edited out, so what follows is the original script; what we intended to cram into six or seven minutes.

The bits that are gone are mainly toward the end--the establishing of Oswald as a patsy and, most sadly, the brilliant JFK And The Unspeakable, which not only makes the case for conspiracy, but places that conspiracy firmly into an ongoing context. You can read my original review of that book, written for the magazine Lobster, here.

Still, it's wonderful to be able to get ahead of the inevitable deluge that will engulf the 50th anniversary come November, and Open Book is, as always, a great listen...

THE LITERATURE OF THE JFK ASSASSINATION

Everybody remembers. I was in eighth grade art class when Mrs Hugins was called away. She came back to tell us President Kennedy had been shot and we were being sent home. Two days later I saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Oswald dead. It was all open and shut.

So it seemed to this boy of 12. JFK's Camelot of a White House had been struck down by a Communist defector misfit. A year later, the Warren Commission endorsed that simple explanation, but instead of calming the nation, it raised more questions than it answered. The Warren Report spawned a minefield of debate and disinformation, which has spawned more than a thousand books. By the time I turned 16, it was open and shut no longer.

The best of the first wave wear their reaction in their titles: Mark Lane's Rush To Judgement, Harold Weisberg's Whitewash, and Sylvia Meagher's Accessories After The Fact which catalogues the evidence buried within the Report's 26 volume appendix. The early fictions, meanwhile, approached Kennedy's murder metaphorically: Thomas Pynchon's Crying Of Lot 49, Loren Singer's Parallax View, and Winter Kills, by Richard Condon (author of the Manchurian Candidate) where the president's assassination is ordered by his mob-connected father.

Stephen King's recent novel 11-22-63 is a throwback, dismissing doubters of the official verdict as those who can't accept Kennedy's death as an act of random absurdity. In his novel, a Maine school-teacher goes back in time to stop Oswald. It's a good time-travel story, powerfully imagining the butterfly effect of Kennedy's survival; much of King's work has always been revisiting a more innocent time. His picture of Oswald as lone crazed assassin fits his sense of American innocence betrayed.

He still had that prissy little smile on his face when he walked up to me. Arrogant and prissy, both at the same time. He's wearing that smile in just about every photograph anyone tried to take of him....basically, there's nothing more to see anyway. Just a skinny little wife-abuser waiting to be famous.

But in the end...it was almost certainly Oswald. You've heard of Occam's Razor, haven't you? ...'all things being equal, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.'
- (reading from 11-22-63)

The collapse of trust in government in the Seventies wake of the Watergate scandal, saw a House of Representatives investigation conclude the likelihood of a Kennedy conspiracy, but also a reluctance to blame anyone but the Mafia. The derailing of the committee is detailed in Gaeton Fonzi's The Last Investigation. British journalist Anthony Summers' Conspiracy, first published in 1980, became the crucial one-volume summary, but the real steps forward belonged to the two best Kennedy novels. Charles McCarry's Tears Of Autumn got him labelled the American John LeCarre,while Don DeLillo's Libra shows a typically obsessive DeLillo protagonist endlessly researching the ultimately unknowable.

“Think of two parallel lines...One is the life of Lee H. Oswald. One is the conspiracy to kill the President. What bridges the space between them? What makes a connection inevitable? There is a third line. It comes out of dreams, visions, intuitions, prayers, out of the deepest levels of the self. It's not generated by cause and effect like the other two lines. It's a line that cuts across causality, cuts across time. It has no history that we can recognize or understand. But it forces a connection. It puts a man on the path of his destiny.

-(reading from Libra)

The third wave of JFK literature was sparked by the 1991 release of Oliver Stone's movie JFK—whose JFK: The Book Of The Film is itself worth reading. The establishment response was Gerald Posner's ballyhooed Case Closed, a prosecutor's selective brief against Oswald and for the Warren Report. Norman Mailer called Posner only intermittently reliable, but used him as the basis for Oswald's Tale, in which Lee's unhappy marriage to the Russian beauty Marina saw him shoot Kennedy in a fit of jealous envy. More telling was James Ellroy, who claims America's innocence disappeared on the first boats over, and said the 'real trinity of Camelot was look good, kick ass, get laid'. No idealist, his conspiracy, laid out in The Cold Six Thousand oozes with sleazy reality.

He got the basic stats: One suspect caught—a kid-- a sheep-dipped leftist. Guy Bannister dipped him. The kid killed a cop. Two cops were sent to kill him. Phase two went bad. The second cop botched his assignment.

Littell holstered up. Littell studied his ID....

The streets were dead. The windows zipped by. Ten thousand TVs glowed.

It was HIS show.

He developed the plan. Pete Bondurant helped. Carlos okayed it and went with Guy Bannister's crew. Guy embellished HIS plan. Guy revised it. Guy botched it. …

Littell counted windows. All tint-distorted. Smudges and blurs. His thoughts blew wide. His thoughts cohered:

Talk to Pete. Kill Oswald. Ensure a one-shooter consensus.
- (reading from The Cold Six Thousand)

The portrait of Oswald we get from Warren, Posner, Mailer, and King actually shows most convincingly that he was uniquely qualified to become someone's perfect patsy. Ray and Mary LaFontaine, in Oswald Talked, made a convincing case for Oswald as a failed government informer, ripe for the set-up. And in 2008, James Douglass' JFK and the Unspeakable put forward the strongest case yet for a conspiracy, including detailing an earlier, eerily similar plot derailed only by the President's cancelling a trip to Chicago. After nearly 50 years, Douglass showed there were still new approaches, with echoes right up to the present.

The Unspeakable is not far away. It is not somewhere out there, identical with a government that became foreign to us. The emptiness of the void, the vacuum of responsibility and compassion, it is ourselves. Our citizen denial provides the grounds for the government's 'plausible deniability'....by avoiding our responsibility for the escalating crimes of state done for our security, we who failed to confront the unspeakable opened the door to JFK's assassination and its coverup.
- (reading from JFK And The Unspeakable)

The problem is believers in conspiracy assume the burden of proof, not just to find who really did pull the trigger on Kennedy, which would be impossible now, but for every other conspiracy as well, whether the Royal Family are really lizards from space or Elvis is still alive. As the generation which remembers the event begins to die off, newer, more immediate plots may push Kennedy into history's background. Meanwhile Oswald's ghost remains a permanent patsy, there to persuade us violence and history really are random, beyond our control. Which is why as Don DeLillo, reminds us...

The valuable work of theorists has shown us the dark possibilities, prodded us to admit to ourselves the difficult truth of the matter. No simple solution, no respite from mystery and chronic suspicion. Conspiracy is now the true faith.
- (reading from De Lillo's 1983 essay 'American Blood: A Journey through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK')

OSWALD'S TALE: THE SPECTATOR REVIEW

This review of Norman Mailer's Oswald's Tale first appeared in the Spectator, 2 September 1995. I dug it out when I was writing my script for my Open Book essay on the literature of the JFK assassination, which I will also post here in its original form sometime after tomorrow's repeat broadcast of Open Book. What follows is slightly different from the published review-- I've made a correction, incorporated some of the ideas from my original draft, and added one or two small points--but it is substantially the same. I was tempted to go off on a tangent, comparing the Kennedys of An American Dream and Oswald's Tale, or the Kennedy of the former with Oswald himself, but that's really a whole separate essay! And I do wish that Mailer had been able to fulfill his promise at the end of Harlot's Ghost: 'to be continued'. And yes, the Henry Wade who was Dallas DA (and denied knowing Jack Ruby, which was easily disproved) is the same DA who was the defendant in Roe vs Wade).

 

If Marina Oswald had let her husband Lee make love to her on the evening of 21 November 1963, John Kennedy might still be alive. This is the major conclusion one can draw from Norman Mailer's 800-page excursion into the life and mind of the world's best-known alleged assassin.

Americans have always been keener on myth than reality, and few American writers have had a sharper grasp of American myth than Mailer. His forte has been taking real people and focusing his intellect and his instincts on what it is that turns them mythic. He has done this both in fiction (with JFK himself in An American Dream) and non-fiction (Richard Nixon, Marilyn Monroe, and, most tellingly, Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song). In many of these cases, it is death itself which confirms iconic status; this is true of John Kennedy and it should be true of Oswald as well. Certainly Mailer would like it to be.

The problem is that Oswald is no Gary Gilmore, and in trying to move him into iconic territory Mailer forgets his own instincts for American myth. A 'lone crazed assassin' might play better for his purposes, but reality has stacked the deck against such an interpretation of Oswald, not least because as a lone assassin he is so mundane. Instead, it is Oswald the patsy, and the JFK conspiracy, that has reached the level of myth.

In 1970, we might have welcomed Mailer's excursion into the conspiratorial quicksands of the assassination. Today, an increasingly prolix Mailer ignores the very lessons of deception he provided just four years ago in his own CIA epic, Harlot's Ghost, and seems content to tie some extensive research together with some dubious sources in a loose bow that comes undone almost instantly.

The new material in Oswald's Tale, much of it assembled by Lawrence Schiller, is an exhaustive combination of interviews conducted in Moscow and Minsk, along with transcripts of the KGB's bugging of Oswald and Marina's flat. Those looking for new insight into the mind and character of Oswald will be sorely disappointed—as will those looking for photographs. There is a good deal of repetition, and at times Mailer seems keener, or at least content, to reveal the character of life in the old Soviet Union, not for any insight it may throw on Oswald or his motives, but just for the chance to apply his metaphoric skills to another country. Certainly the new republic of Belarus may have welcomed that. But after all the information has been disseminated, the picture of Oswald still has huge questions, and Mailer's answers leave huge holes.

One might expect those holes to be filled once Oswald returns to the USA, but it is here the book falls apart. Mailer's two main sources for this period are Priscilla Johnson MacMillan's Marina and Lee and Gerald Posner's Case Closed (Posner's book itself draws heavily on the former). This is akin to using Mein Kampf as your primary source for a book about the Holocaust.

The best that can be said about Marina and Lee is that government agents sequestered Marina Oswald, who feared deportation, AND granted MacMillan exclusive access to her. Like others handed exclusives, she delivered what those granting the favour desired: a portrait of a lone crazed assassin in the making. It was not her first encounter with Oswald; in Moscow she had interviewed the putative defector; she has admitted to at least being debriefed by the CIA when she returned to Boston, though not to having discussed Oswald at all. Marina Oswald's story changed over the years, depending on who she was talking to. Mailer's interpretation of Marina's various testimonies is a keystone in granting Oswald his killer's status, yet as recently as 1993 Marina herself said unequivocally that 'Lee did not do it'.

Posner takes things a step further, by distorting or ignoring the case for conspiracy. Mailer obviously distrusts Case Closed; he has referred to Posner as 'only intermittently reliable', and occasionally he points out some of Posner's more blatant twistings of the record. Amazingly, he still relies on the book as a primary source. By following Posner, Mailer accepts a world full of extraordinary coincidence, in which none of the coincidences are meaningful. Oswald becomes a homicidal Zelig popping up a the right time in the Texas School Book Depository, while the people who shared the stage with him are simply written out of his tale. Posner's book was billed as being definitive on the JFK assassination; really it is a clumsy bit of extended character assassination: if we can convince you Oswald really was a nutter then you'll ignore the evidence and believe he acted alone.

Having journeyed 800 pages trying to build a portrait of Oswald as a singular force in history, Mailer is obliged, like Posner, to ignore the most obvious interpretation of Oswald's seemingly delusional and often contradictory psyche: he was the perfect candidate to be set up as someone's patsy. Mailer's coy dance around the possibility of Oswald's homosexuality lends the word patsy a particular vibrancy. Don De Lillo, in Libra, showed us more behind the shadows of those gay contacts, particularly the bizarre David Ferrie. Oliver Stone was accused, like Jim Garrison before him, of using Clay Shaw's sexuality to help demonise the possible conspirators, even Oswald. But for Mailer, this aspect of Oswald merely hints at why Marina wouldn't put out on that fateful night.

Proving there was a conspiracy requires showing only that a few of the myriad coincidences of Oswald's life are not merely random. Jack Ruby has always been a short-odds entry in that sweepstakes. For example, when Ruby corrected Dallas DA Henry Wade's reference to Oswald's subversive activities' at the Friday night press conference ('that's Fair Play For Cuba Committee') we wonder how Ruby knew the name of Oswald's bogus committee, and why he thought it crucial to set the record straight. Maybe he was just another pathetic attention-seeker, but witnesses also placed him with Oswald in his strip joint, the Carousel Club; in Dealey Plaza that morning; and at Parkland Hospital when JFK died.

The problem is that if just a few facts which suggest a conspiracy are real, then they challenge the hypothesis of Oswald as Norman Bates, as a lone crazed assassin, and Mailer must seek his new Gary Gilmore elsewhere. Oswald's Tale is indeed an American mystery, because Kennedy's death was the product of something more than an unrequited hard-on. That has always been Mailer's territory, but once upon a time Mailer would have been less concerned with solving the mystery, and more concerned with the deeper tale of an American tragedy.

Oswald's Tale: An American Tragedy by Norman Mailer

Little Brown, 1995, £25