Oswald’s Tale By Norman Mailer
One of the rare books by Norman Mailer that got good reviews and sold poorly. British critics were more enthusiastic than their American counterparts. Mailer’s attempt to make Oswald if not sympathetic at least human did appall many on this side of the Atlantic. But Andrew O’Hagan praised Mailer’s fictional account of “Oswald’s struggle to become a man—to become an important and effective male character—as the foundation of much of his adult distress …” Allen Massie found Mailer’s Oswald, “both likeable and repulsive; to be pitied and feared. He is in many ways … like the young Hitler revealed in Mein Kampf.”
Mailer disappointed numerous conspiracy theorists by coming to the conclusion that, as Mailer’s biographer J. Michael Lennon put it, Mailer chose “no conspiracy, and a complex Oswald; a man dealt a bad hand, in no way heroic, but bold, idealistic in a twisted way, and sympathetic.”