Mailer's massive study of the Gilmore case is unlikely to have the impact its author expected. All journalism dates, and this is not so much the higher as the longer journalism: 1,056 big pages and far too many facts. The value of this sedulous accumulation was presumably intended to rest on the uniqueness of Gilmore's rejection of penal liberalism, but Gilmore has ceased to be unique. Style will not preserve the book, since it has no style...

What we might have expected from The Executioner's Song is a Mailerian mystico-astrologico-metaphysical expatiation on the significance of Gilmore – quasi-existential victim-hero – in a culture increasingly selling out to evil, but there is no commentary as there is no style. The question must finally be asked: why bother? Granted that every human soul may be worthy of 1,056 pages, why should a cold murderer with a certain capacity for love and poetry be deemed worthier of such expensive celebration than the harmless grocer of Gissing's New Grub Street?