Mailer's commentary is valuable and his judgments generally legitimate if not beyond dispute, though occasionally Miller's style seems to infect and weaken Mailer's, and Mailer will condemn a slack flat passage of Miller's in order to praise a merely flatulent one. Miller anthologizes well because his completed works are usually shapeless, repetitious and shamelessly self‐indulgent; but this is a catastrophic condition when it comes, finally, to estimating Miller's position as an artist, for he is simply not a shaper. Overcome by content, he grows repetitive but not recursive, and his work expands without getting deeper.

The passages Mailer chooses for excerption, heavily weighted as they are toward Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, and Tropic of Capricorn, show us a distinctly Mailer-like Miller, as opposed, say, to the mere pornographer of Quiet Days in Clichy or the excitable philosopher-critic of The Time of the Assassins. And the effect is reinforced by Mailer's introductions, which, emulating Miller's style, underscore his courage, his energy, his wild metaphors, his nose for sewer gas—in a word, all the traits that would make us think at once of Mailer. At times Genius and Lust appears less like a "journey" than like a tandem attempt to scale Mons Veneris, almost as if these perennially boyish explorers were being incited by one another's pneumatic prose.