Norman Mailer can't draw.
Norman Mailer is old. And old people, like children and accident victims with motor skills to regain, sometimes doodle. If you're Norman Mailer, the doodles are collected in a sleek, heavy-paper volume and published by Henry Holt. By transforming private scraps into public art, the act of publishing has privileged Mailer's doodles over millions of others scratched into Trapper Keepers and toilet stalls around the world. But privileged is different than good, and Norman Mailer's line-drawing portraits are not good. They are victimless crimes. If the book didn't open with a coherent preface, Modest Gifts would be a fair basis for assuming the 80-year-old Mailer is in the grips of Alzheimer's, or a severe and unreported right-hemisphere stroke.
It takes a monstrous ego like Mailer's to publish these pictures, both because they are so bad and because there is a near-sacred precedent for novelist doodles, one set by another living giant of American letters: Kurt Vonnegut, with his self-illustrated Breakfast of Champions. Vonnegut, too, possessed modest talents as an artist, yet he used them beautifully and without apology in his work at the height of his career, at a time when Mailer was writing very dense and very boring books. For Mailer to coyly dish these lame pictures off now for 15 bucks is a joke. He offers his folio to readers as a "pleasurable" counterpoint to his "serious work," but only the most depraved Mailer groupie will find anything to appreciate in these squibbles.