What is the author's style in The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer?

Norman Mailer is both a journalist and a novelist and has dealt deftly with the English language in both genres. He falls short on both counts with Executioner's Song, however, by trying to meld both genres into a single work. During many of the author's descriptions of the seedy characters who populate the tome, he attempts to emulate their street, gutter and prison lexicons, while remaining in the omniscient narrator's voice. His effort fails, and the hybrid genre he calls a "factual novel" dies before it is born. As an erudite, educated author, Mailer comes across as a clown when he mimics convicts and trailer trash, straining his objectivity and intellectual integrity to the breaking point. On the other hand, by pretending to stick to the facts where convenient, he self-inflicts constraints that prevent him from spieling a really good yarn - a freedom he would have if he abandoned his pretense of objective journalism. As a result of all this juggling of genres, Executioner's Song comes off as an almost amateurish experiment.