Larry McMurtry was born in Texas, where he now lives. His many novels include Horseman, Pass By (1961), filmed as Hud in 1963 and The Last Picture Show (1966) which was made into a film in 1971. Lonesome Dove won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985.
Age in year of publication: forty-nine.
Norman Mailer 1923–2007
1979 The Executioner’s Song
The Executioner’s Song is a brilliant work of imagination, based on numerous interviews given by the murderer Gary Gilmore and those around him. Gilmore was executed by firing squad in Utah having demanded the death penalty for himself; he had spent twenty-two of his thirty-five years in jail.
The novel moves like a camera, describing each scene coldly and dispassionately in short paragraphs, never judging, never summing up, never overwriting, allowing each character great latitude and sympathy. It is a triumph of control; the author and his famous ego are totally absent. No one is good or bad; people are motivated by strange, complex passions, longings, compulsions and loyalties. The novel is full of sex and sexual desire in a climate controlled by Mormons. Gilmore’s girlfriend Nicole is one of the great creations in contemporary American writing; she is protean and wild and impulsive, deeply loyal and, at the same time, easily distracted. Gilmore emerges as damaged and trapped, his willingness to destroy and be destroyed giving the book a grim tragic power and a sort of grandeur.
Norman Mailer was born in New Jersey and grew up in Brooklyn. His talent as a novelist was often disguised by the extent and uneven quality of his publications. His best books included The Naked and the Dead (1948), Armies of the Night (1968), The Fight (1975) and Miami and the Siege of Chicago (1969). The Executioner’s Song won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980.
Age in year of publication: fifty-six.
Bernard Malamud 1914–1986
1952 The Natural
This is one of the best books about sport, which means that it is about much more than the game of baseball which it describes. It is written in a spare clear style, and in a tone in which light and darkness do battle against each other for the body and soul of our hero.
It opens with the nineteen-year-old Roy Hobbs going to Chicago on a train with his scout. He is an orphan who has been discovered as a baseball wizard and he is destined for the big time. When the train has to stop, he pitches his skills against a famous baseball player who is also on the train, and wins. He is watched by a journalist who will follow the rest of his career, and a woman called Harriet, his nemesis, who is crazy and manages to shoot him in the stomach.
The rest of the novel takes place fifteen years later when Roy makes one last effort to succeed. He is too old, and he is still capable of being bewitched by women (all the women in this novel bewitch); he is moody and hungry for sex and love and hero status, but he is still a brilliant player. The games — the crowd, the tension, the next shot — are described in the novel with great verve and excitement. Roy Hobbs’s uneasy but ravenous desire, his desperation to avoid the past, give the narrative a stark power and depth. It is the raw simplicity of The Natural, his first novel, which makes it so gripping.
Bernard Malamud was born in Brooklyn. His other masterpieces are The Fixer (1967) and Dubin’s Lives (1979), and his Collected Stories were published in 1997. The Natural was made into a film in 1984.
Age in year of publication: thirty-eight.
David Malouf 1934–
1990 The Great World
The Great World is a portrait of Australian life during and after the Second World War. It is hard to make generalizations about Malouf’s work. He never repeats himself. His characters are portrayed and handled with great feeling and depth; he is capable of creating moments of pure beauty in his books; he insists always on the complexity of things, the various levels on which things happen.
In his three novels of the 1990s, Remembering Babylon (1993), set in a remote part of Queensland in the middle of the nineteenth century, and The Conversations at Curlew Creek (1996), a dark, intense novel set in early nineteenth-century Australia and Ireland, he has been constructing a sort of history of Australia, an old and new testament for his own country. The Great World deals superbly with the drama of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp; indeed, the novel could have dealt solely with that experience. But this is a more ambitious book, which follows a number of characters back to Australia and makes what happens to them during subsequent decades, emotionally and domestically, in their work and their families, hugely interesting, so that you feel you know them. The Great World is memorable for the range of the characters’ emotional response, for the depth and detail and sheer integrity of the writing.
David Malouf was born in Brisbane and lives in Sydney. He is also a poet and librettist. The Great World won the Commonwealth Writers Prize. His other books include the magnificent An Imaginary Life (1978), a brilliant account of Ovid in exile and after exile, and The Complete Stories (2007).
Age in year of publication: fifty-six.
Olivia Manning 1908–1980
1960–1965 The Balkan Trilogy
The Great Fortune (1960), The Spoilt City (1962), Friends and Heroes (1965)
The Balkan Trilogy recounts in fictional form Olivia Manning’s Second World War experiences as the young bride of a British Council lecturer, first in Romania, then in Greece and finally in Egypt, moving always away from the advancing German army. Harriet Pringle, Manning’s alter ego, lives in cities where revolution, imprisonment and persecution of the Jews are omnipresent, while expatriates and a motley crew of other riffraff pursue the last remaining restaurant in which horse is not served, or finagle money or favours to enable them to survive one more day.
Harriet, a young woman never loved in childhood and about to repeat the experience with her infuriating husband Guy, is a discerning recorder of the cruelties and fragilities of men in pursuit of power, of whatever kind. A parade of eccentrics, led by the seedy emigre Yakomov, the preposterous Lord Pinkrose, the potty Misses Twocurry, alternate with personal lives from which the plangent notes of private love and grief are never absent. Reading The Balkan Trilogy, one of the finest accounts of the impact of war on Europe and on its people, is like reading Jane Austen on a broader canvas, in another time, another place.
Olivia Manning was born in Portsmouth, grew up in Ireland, and except for the Second World War, spent most of her life in London. The Levant Trilogy — The Danger Tree (1977), The Battle Lost and Won (1978) and The Sum of Things (1980) — continues The Balkan Trilogy, the entire sequence entitled The Fortunes of War.