Re: JCO: RE: Talent vs Experience

In a message dated 10/18/2005 12:04:45 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, NotEnoughKittens@aol.com writes:

It strikes me as remarkably condescending from an author whose one great novel, The Naked and the Dead, is about war......he apparently never found anything else that suited his talents.  JCO is worth several dozen Norman Mailers, as a writer that and, I suspect, as a person

In many ways the Mailer quotation is quite flattering, in that he says that JCO's talent allows her to write about subjects about which she may not have very much personal experience. I cannot, however, see how his remark that a woman cannot be brave in the way a soldier is brave is anything other than blatant sexism. In other words, I get the sense he admires JCO genuinely, but from this quotation I gather he's a touch misogynist. To me, this is somewhat an unflattering characteristic. I heard Mailer speak last year and he was quite interesting. He got very political, and as I'm in the same camp as he I quite enjoyed it. (There was a woman in the audience, however, who got into a fight with him afterward saying that he was filling our college-student brains with propaganda or something.)

 

Andy