Odd couple …

… William F. Buckley, Jr., and Norman Mailer’s Friendship — The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

In “Buckley and Mailer” (Norton), whose overstated subtitle is “The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties,” Kevin M. Schultz, a historian at the University of Illinois-Chicago, sets out to reconstruct an association that in fact had less warp and woof to it than Buckley’s friendship with Galbraith. John B. Judis’s biography of Buckley says that he was “friendly with” but never “very close” to Mailer. Still, Buckley’s durable cordiality toward Mailer is more remarkable than his being amigos with Galbraith or belligerents with Vidal, and it seems pardonable for Schultz to extend what ought to have been a magazine article into a book-length safari in search of something significant. Here and there he even finds it.