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The strangest thing about The Executioner's Song is that Norman Mailer is nowhere in it. The most self-advertising writer of his generation - the man who could not cover a moon landing or a boxing match without making himself the protagonist - spent over a thousand pages in a voice so flat, so stripped of figurative language and authorial flourish, that it reads at times like the transcript of a place rather than a book about one. That restraint is the masterstroke. It is also, depending on the page, the problem.

The story itself needs little embellishment. Gary Gilmore, paroled in April 1976 after spending nearly all of his adolescent and adult life behind bars, arrives in Provo, Utah, to live with relatives who hope he can be salvaged. He cannot. Within months he has shot two young men in cold blood, been sentenced to death, and - in the twist that made him a national obsession - refused to appeal, demanding the state carry out its sentence by firing squad. He became the first person executed in America after the Supreme Court lifted its moratorium on capital punishment, and the circus that gathered around his cell forms the book's entire second half.

The first half is close to flawless. Mailer renders working-class Utah - the trailer parks, the shoe store, the borrowed trucks and shoplifted beer - in a plainspoken Western register that captures a vast emptiness at the center of the American experience, a dread so close to zero that the human voices seem to trail off into the landscape. Gilmore himself emerges as a genuinely multi-dimensional figure: a man who says he wants a home, a family, a life like other people's, and who is constitutionally incapable of any of it. His obsessive, destructive relationship with nineteen-year-old Nicole Baker - including a failed suicide pact and reams of misspelled, uncannily adolescent love letters - is disturbing precisely because Mailer refuses to editorialize about it. The murders, when they come, are rendered with a banality that is far more chilling than any gothic treatment could have been.

Then the book shifts, and the seams begin to show. The second half - "Eastern Voices," covering the legal maneuvering, the stay-of-execution battles, and above all the journalists and agents scrambling for the rights to Gilmore's story - is markedly less compelling. The sections on the media feeding frenzy are overdrawn, lacking the intensity of the Provo chapters, and watching people with already tragic lives get further commodified is dispiriting in a way that does not always feel intentional. At 1,000-plus pages, the suspicion creeps in that the length is partly a demonstration: Mailer showing off just how much material he and Lawrence Schiller gathered, rather than shaping it. A judicious edit would have cost the book little and gained it a great deal.

There is a deeper objection too, and it deserves to be taken seriously. For all the surface objectivity, Mailer's sympathies are legible. He admired Gilmore's refusal to rot quietly in prison, his insistence on dying on his own terms, and that admiration tilts the book toward treating its subject as an existential hero rather than a man who murdered two innocent people for nothing. Alice Kaminsky, whose own son was murdered, wrote an entire book in furious response, accusing Mailer of elevating Gilmore's prison-cell eloquence while ignoring the gravity of his deeds and the wreckage left behind. The victims, Max Jensen and Bennie Bushnell, occupy a fraction of these pages. That imbalance is not an oversight; it is the book's moral blind spot, and no amount of formal brilliance fully closes it.

And yet the formal brilliance is real. The Pulitzer it won in 1980 - controversially, in the fiction category, for a work assembled from interviews and documents - acknowledged something genuinely new: a "true life novel" that demonstrated the undiminished power of empirical narrative to move and instruct. Set beside In Cold Blood, its obvious predecessor, it is messier, longer, and less elegant, but also less manipulated - Capote shaped his material into art, while Mailer let his sprawl into something closer to life.

The Executioner's Song is not a pleasant book, and it is not an innocent one. It is a feat - a meditation on violence, prisons, Mormonism, the media, and American loneliness that justifies most, if not all, of its enormous length. Read it for the first five hundred pages, endure the next five hundred, and argue with it afterward. It expects nothing less.