A dark, brilliant novel of astonishing pitch, set in Provincetown, a “spit of shrub and dune” captured here in the rawness and melancholy of the off-season, Tough Guys Don’t Dance is the story of Tim Madden, an unsuccessful writer addicted to bourbon, cigarettes, and blonde, careless women with money. On the twenty-fourth morning after the decampment of his wife, Patty Lareine, he awakens with a hangover, considerable sexual excitement, and, on his upper arm, a blue tattoo bearing a name from the past. Of the night before, he remembers practically nothing. What he soon learns is that the front passenger seat of his Porsche is soaked with blood and that in a secluded corner of his marijuana stash in a nearby woods rests a blonde head, severed at the throat.

Is Madden therefore a murderer? He has no way of knowing. As in many novels of crime, the narrative centers on violence—physical, sexual, and emotional—but these elements move in their orbits through a rich constellation of character as Madden tries to reconstruct the missing hours of a terrible evening. In the course of this in-quiry a bizarre and vividly etched gallery of characters reappears to him as in a dream—ex-prizefighters, sexual junkies, mediums, former cons, a police chief, a world-weary former girl friend, and Mad-den’s father, old now but still a Herculean figure, a practitioner of the sternest backroom ethics.

Tough Guys Don’t Dance represents Mailer at the peak of his powers with a stunningly conceived novel that soon transcends its origins as a mystery to become a relentless search into the recesses and buried virtues of the modern American male. Rarely, as many readers will discern, have the paradoxes of machismo and homosexuality been so well explored.

from:www.cosyreading.info

诺曼·梅勒（1923—），美国犹太裔作家，生于新泽西州朗布兰奇，童年在纽约布鲁克林区度过。1943年毕业于哈佛大学，曾在军队服役两年，战后从事写作。梅勒是个在政治上十分活跃的小说家，对马克思主义和存在主义同样感兴趣。他的作品往往直接反映美国的社会问题和政治问题，并获得普利策小说奖，全国图书奖和全国艺术俱乐部文学金质奖章等多项奖。发表于1945年的长篇小说《裸者与死者》是梅勒的成名作，因深刻地揭示了美国军队中官兵之间的对立关系，被公认为描写第二次世界大战的最佳小说之一。《巴巴里海滨》（1951）则象征性地描写了美国左派政治力量和右派政治势力的冲突。《鹿苑》（1955）以同样的手法描绘了好莱坞电影界的苦闷和窒息。10年后，发表的长篇小说《一场美国梦》（1965）逼真地描写了美国社会中肆无忌惮的暴力、凶杀和强奸事件，从而揭示了美国的混乱和美国梦的破灭。《我们为什么在越南》（1967）都是一部宣扬存在主义的作品。《古代的傍晚》（1983）是梅勒的一部近作，主要以古代埃及为背景。自1959年以来，梅勒在创作上发生了重大转折，连续发表了多部“新新闻报导”作品，或称为“非虚构小说，主要有长篇论文《白种黑人》（1959），散文集《总统文件》（1963）传记《玛丽琳》（1973）。《夜间的大军》（196s）等详尽地记叙了新左派向五角大楼进军的过程。而作为“生活实录小说刃的《刽子手之歌》（1979），因深入地探讨了一名死囚犯罪的心理原因和社会原因，被誉为非虚构小说的代表作。