Reading Mailer

I've always been impressed by Norman Mailer's writing. Not only is it intelligent and entertaining, it also combines all sorts of dissimilar elements together in an intoxicating brew. At his best, his writing illuminates its subject from many different angles, circling around it, probing, musing, and theorizing. This is the writing of The White Negro and the rest of Advertisements of Myself . When it doesn't work - as the interminable novel Ancient Evenings or most of his later writings - he comes off as self-indulgent, as someone that thinks too hard about subjects that don't necessarily deserve it, or that he tries too hard to mythologize the subject. The one standard is that he's never dull.
This is why I find myself reading Miami and the Siege of Chicago, his first-person account of the Republican and Democratic political conventions in 1968. He starts off talking about Miami, and makes many interesting observations about the city and the players involved:

Like pieces of flesh fragmented from the explosion of a grenade, echoses of the horror of Kennedy's assassination were thus everywhere: helicopters riding overhead like roller coasters, state troopers with magnums of their hip and crash helmets, squad cards, motorcycles, yet no real security, just powers of retaliation.

p. 20, emphasis mine

There was unity only in the way the complacency of the voice matched the complacency of the ideas. It was as if Richard Nixon were proving that a man who had never spent an instant inquiring whether family, state, church and flag were every wrong could go on in secure steps, denuded of risk, from office to office until he was President.

Another tactic he takes here that I found fascinating is an in-depth philosophical analysis of Nixon's press conference where Mailer shuffles Nixon's replies with his analysis... it's riveting, even when it sounds like hyperbole.