The good news is that Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song … is a superb piece of writing. It has the scope and wallop of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy; its realism contains echoes of Zola and Frank Norris and James T. Farrell; and it reaffirms the vitality and the validity of the social novel, which, having fled underground with the advent of the Cold War, has now re-emerged with incredible pulsing power. The Executioner's Song is (or should be) the occasion for rousing cheers.

In spare, detached, almost journalistic prose Mailer demonstrates that he is a master of suspenseful narration and of character building through adroit use of quotations, dialogue, and stark personal interactions. The result is a camera-eye focus on the underside of American society; on the loathsomeness of some of its inhabitants who exist in mirror image to cultivated society; on the failure of our penal system...