Hitchens is in his obituary best. Apparently, Tough Guys Don’t Dance is a bad novel. That sounds about right.

I do want to look up this 12 page “heroic struggle to bring a stubborn woman to orgasm.” Nice bedtime read. If it’s online somewhere, I’ll link to it here.

EDIT: Here’s one description:

What is one to make, for instance, of the shocking story ”The Time of Her Time”? It recounts a sexual encounter between the narrator (Mailer in the guise of an Irishman named Sergius O’Shaugnessy) and Denise Gondelman, a middle-class ”Jewish girl” in her third year at New York University. Denise, though sexually experienced, has never reached orgasm, never lost her ”final virginity.” It takes three sexual encounters, an act of sodomy and a touch of Jewish self-hatred (Denise’s and perhaps Mailer’s as well) before she finally arrives at ”her time.”

Sounds promising.

EDIT 2: It gets better and better:

He constructed absurd melodramas of sexual conquest and then cast himself as their inevitable hero. His ubiquitous descriptions of sex are wince-makingly embarrassing. In “The Time of Her Time,” for example—a fictional sketch that concludes *Advertisements for Myself* and of which Mailer was particularly proud—the hero refers to his penis as “the avenger” and is taken to saying things like “For her, getting it from me, it must have been impressive.”

Off I go to Borders. This stuff is comedy gold.