In writing “Always Merry and Bright,” I dug out my copy of Genius and Lust: A Journey Through the Major Writings of Henry Miller by Normal Mailer. I purchased it used on Amazon, I think, probably back in the late 1990s.

It’s a strange book, where Mailer’s commentary is brief compared to the long passages taken from Miller’s books, unedited and uncommented. But his introductions are lucid and penetrating.

Rhonda saw the book out last night after we came back from sushi and did a double-take. I read a lot but not paper books. But this isn’t one you can find electronically, or at least not easily. I didn’t look very hard, although you can read it on Internet Archive if you’re so inclined. I’m not.

Novels Don’t Always Seem Like Novels

I got into a little bit of a Mailer back in college and shortly afterward, and I was thinking about this a little this morning. Tropic of Cancer was an awakening in part because it wasn’t a novel in the sense of the word that I understood it; it was a loosely auto-biographical book that does not attempt to tell a story from start to finish. If you imagine a novel that you enjoyed recently (or ever), you can summarize it in the way that might make an English teacher proud: plot, characters, rising action, resolution, all of that. Tropic of Cancer doesn’t really fit into that analysis, and I think it’s one of the things about it that struck me when I read it.

In an unfocused way, I found myself reading things in my later college years that fit into this vein. I also found myself assuming that some of these pieces were in fact autobiographical in the same way that Tropic was, when in fact I was reading a novel in the classic sense.

Mailer’s Tought Guys Don’t Dance was once such example. I was picking through the stacks at Myrin Library at Ursinus and found a copy of it, and started reading it. I don’t know how far I got before I realized that this was kind of a mystery novel. It was so carefully narrated by a first-person voice that I fell into the story and had to remind myself it wasn’t autobiographical. I remember being a little disappointed even.