What do You think about Tough Guys Don't Dance (2002)?
okay, at this point i just flat-out love norman mailer, but his endings are really letting me down. his voice is so wild and burning and furious, so full of madness and spiritual and intellectual yearning, but then somehow his stories always devolve into just a bunch of people sitting around and baldly explaining the story to each other in the least interesting way conceivable. he makes a big show of being an anti-rationalist, but as far as stories go, he's a total realist; all this lip service to ghosts and god and the beyond goes out the window in favor of neatly tying things up like a b-grade detective story circa 1952. HERE'S HOW I KILLED THESE PEOPLE AND WHY; NOW WASN'T THAT ALL INCREDIBLY BORING? at this point i'm really starting to suspect that Ancient Evenings has gotta be the one! or maybe The Gospel According to the Son-- somewhere he's gotta be able to break through "reality" enough to allow the storyworld to form according to his actual beliefs... reading these books is like watching someone with wings NOT JUMP OFF A CLIFF over and over and over again... JUST JUMP OFF THE GODDAMN CLIFF, NORMAN MAILER!!! I WANNA SEE YOU FLY!!!!!either that, or i should just stick to his journalism... i love when he rants about plastic...
—Ben Loory
Lo peor que he leído hasta el momento de Mailer. Cómo un tipo capaz de parir Los Desnudos y los Muertos, o La Canción del Verdugo puede escribir esta novela, es algo que no dejo de preguntarme. Al principio promete. No sigue los cánones de la novela negra al milímetro. En vez de ceñirse a la trama, el tipo empieza a recrearse en idas de pinza del protagonista, dotándole de un trasfondo que es casi más interesante que el leitmotiv. Sin embargo, conforme avanza la novela, lo que cuenta el protagonista deja de ser interesante y el argumento principal empieza a verse como lo que es, algo que no se sostiene y es maniqueísta a más no poder (la trama está al nivel de un capítulo de Scooby Doo). Mucho mejor la primera mitad del libro que la segunda.Lo malo es que cogeré el próximo libro de Mailer con resquemor.
—Sergio
Tough Guys Don't Dance is set in Provincetown during the off-season, when the few natives become inverted and spend most of their time in dark bars. It begins as a pretty straightforward, albeit dark, mystery, but quickly turns surreal and nightmarish as you spend a week of hell with our victim/suspect/murderer(?), as he attempts to piece together just what happened on the night he blacked out drunk and woke up with a tattoo on his arm that reads "Laurel", vague recollections of arguing with his missing wife, blood in his car, and a severed head tucked neatly away in his marijuana patch. It only gets weirder from there as we meet bizarre characters (a man who dances on the top of roofs during lightning storms, a sheriff with an unhealthy love for guns and weed, and a gambling addict so obsessed with the New England Patriots that he will bet on them every time, even though the story is set in the early 1980's...bizarre indeed), well-timed twists, and a surprisingly deep look into the human psyche. It is at times a brutal look at life, and since this is a Normal Mailer book, there is plenty of depravity and detailed examinations of the darker side of man. All in all, a great read that rises above the typical mystery. Huzzah!
—Andrew
