Pulling no punches.(Book review)

The stories of Mailers pursuit of six wives, with whom he fathered nine children, are counterpointed by serial infidelities, affairs as ripe and plentiful as a bumper crop, that Mailer only seriously tried to stop under the influence of his last wife, the bright beauty queen, painter and writer from Arkansas, Norris Church, who stood up to him, forcing him, as he said, into his last great experiment, fidelity. Lennon, a onetime literature professor, observes Norman, with whom he worked for 30 years, with great human understanding for Mailer but applies his critical faculties dispassionately to his subjects writing.\n A few years later, after open heart surgery, his 80th birthday and his feeling, as Lennon tells us, that he had become a battered freighter still plying the sea lanes, he asked Lennon to collaborate with him by drawing him out with questions about God.