Sir, - Norman Mailer's selection in The Time of Our Time from 50 years of authorship (fiction, journalism, and a blend of both) runs to almost 1,300 pages. Eileen Battersby's review of it (Books, July 24th) is about 300 words long and is remarkable for its critical myopia and its patronising tone.
Her arbitary pecking order of Capote, Vidal and Mailer is a meaningless one and, more importantly, her glib judgment on Mailer's massive if uneven output is an insult to your readers and highlights the shortcomings of these weekly cryptic paperback commentaries.
To write that Mailer "is not a unique commentator [on American life], and his prose, for all its bombast, is at best laboured", suggests that Ms Battersby has not read, for example, The Executioner's Song, a book that greatly expands our understanding of the possibilities of written narratives, or Of A Fire On The Moon, 30 years old now and probably the most illuminating account ever written of the Apollo 11 mission. - Yours etc.,
Brian Donnelly, Dalkey, Co Dublin.