Reading Executioner's Song I Have to Say I Think Norman Mailer Was a Westerner Deep Down

I am reading this and I am thinking: there is nothing that will make Norman happy. And I am saying to myself: if this won't make you happy you may as well make it as plain and straightforward as you like, not elaborate too much because why bother? Also I am considering the empty west in which every road ends in the desert and the lives are so dustblown and unaesthetic that a man can be shot by the State and his ashes scattered from a plastic breadbag marked 59cents and the bag is seen neither insulting nor funny but merely expedient, as is that burnt human body and the bodies that body shot before in turn getting shot. There is a grid of streets to the gray desert. There are the pastel buildings thrown up and adolescent. The all-you-can-eats and the fiberglass steeples. A cheapness over the land showing how tired they were who stopped here and how ambivalent their arrival. This is where they were when their boots wore through and it was time to plant anyway is what these buildings say. They must have eaten in silence and hurried, for the fuel not for any convivial enjoyment, those who built this place. They raised this place to be done with a job. So Mailer was a Jersey Jew? To read this and his other books, so various in style, and his Wikipedia bio is to know he felt truly western, which is to say: his ashes in a breadbag and his every road into the dust.