Tough Guys Don't Dance

A Novel

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.

©1984 Norman Mailer. (P)2016 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, for permission to reprint "One's Neighbor's Wife" from Hugging the Shore by John Updike, copyright © 1983 by John Updike. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC.

Great fun if occasionally offensive bits don't much alienate you.

Early in this energetically written atmospheric and ingeniously plotted Cape Cod tale, writer Tim Madden awakens with a gruesome hangover, an arm throbbing from a surprise tattoo, blood all over his wife's Porsche and memory of little of last night but a vision of a severed female head in his marijuana stash. What to do? Reader will find that Madden forges enthrallingly forward. Moreover, they'll find that Mailer doubly entertains, for -- to quote Martin Aims' review of Mailer's "Oswald" in The London Sunday — they'll be treated to a "performance of an author relishing the force and reach of his own acuity." On the other hand, readers of many sorts - gentee,l macho, gay, homophobic, most women - will find offensive moments in the frequently lurid and/ or goofy asides on sex and ghosts by narrator Madden/Mailerr.

I absolutely hated this book!

If I could get my money back, I would!
Disgusting language, unlikeable characters and a story line which simply wanders...
Very, very disappointed!
I rarely, if ever, choose not to finish a book, but there is no pleasure in reading any further...

way too predictable

had high hopes for this 'noir thriller', but no comparison to Ascenseur pour l'échafaud / lift to the gallows. The plot is very predictable and the ending sappy.