The Executioner's Song is a "plain, unvarnished tale," stitched together from hundreds of hours of interviews, about half of them conducted by Mailer, with supporting characters and bit players in the Gary Gilmore saga. The story is told from several dozen points of view….

Mixing the different voices proved to be Mailer's highest hurdle. "I was brought up not to jump from one person's mind into another," he says. "I thought that was what poor writers did when they didn't have enough imagination to find a form. But then, I thought, the shifting point of view was a 19th-century form, it went back to a time when people believed in God and the novelist could play at being the All Knowing Supreme Deity."

In this case, the deity orchestrates the voices, but does not join in the song. The qualities (or flaws, depending on one's point of view...