The Time of Our Time

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The Time of Our Time is an anthology of

Mailer endeavored to produce not an anthology, but a book that offers “some hint at a social and cultural history over these last fifty years.” The compendium he produced reflects the way his sense of the character shifted each decade, and many of the works derive from his sense of the value of fiction. “There is little in this book even when it comes under the formal category of non-fiction or argument,” he writes, “that has not derived, then, from my understanding of how one writes fiction.”[2]

The New York Times review of The Time of Our Time characterizes the work as a “neatly interwoven” collection that tells a story of its own, a “social history of postwar America, at the heart of which is Mailer's own tangled love affair with this country.” And while “Mailer's technical skills may not have declined in the ensuing decades, his cultural authority has, and The Time of Our Time offers some clues as to why.”^[3] Meanwhile, the The Hudson Review admitted that despite “all its weaknesses,” The Time of Our Time “does add up to a relatively coherent subjective account of our times,” covering such topics as the Cold War, the Kennedy assassination, the civil rights and antiwar movements, the Moon landing, women’s lib, and Watergate, among others.^[4]

Notes

References

• Mailer, Norman. The Time of Our Time. New York: Random House Inc., 1998.
• https://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/10/reviews/980510.10shapirt.html
• http://www.brucebawer.com/mailer.htm