Tough Guys Don't Dance

Norman Mailer peers into the recesses and buried virtues of the modern American male in a brilliant crime novel that transcends genre. When Tim Madden an unsuccessful writer living on Cape Cod awakes with a gruesome hangover a painful tattoo on his upper arm and a severed female head in his marijuana stash he has almost no memory of the night before. As he reconstructs the missing hours Madden runs afoul of retired prizefighters sex addicts mediums former cons a world-weary ex-girlfriend and his own father old now but still a Herculean figure. Stunningly conceived and vividly composed Tough Guys Don't Dance represents Mailer at the peak of his powers.