I have yet to read any comments about Norman Mailer since his passing that have mentioned his recent abandonment of athiesm and adoption of a belief in God. This was not a sudden transformation and is not surprising to anyone who has read his novel, The Gospel of Jesus according to the Son. Like many serious thinkers, Mailer had many wide interests as a writer which have led many critics to chastise him for squandering his talent with a casual approach to writing. Like a musician having fun in a jam session, Mailer enjoyed writing on the surface of things as well as probing the depths, often in lyrical and metaphysical ways. Sure, he wrote about Marilyn Monroe and boxing. But my appreciation of Mailer began just after the Challenger space shuttle tragedy of 1986 when I read Of A Fire on the Moon, a journalistic meditation on the earlier Apollo space program and the landing of Americans on the moon. In that account, Mailer's prose tried to match the awesome technological feat of putting a man on the moon with a literary style of dazzling, dizzying, and detailed command of language, facts, and psychic intuition into the meaning of space exploration and aeronautical engineering. For a man who wanted to write the great American novel and who wrote about his fantasy of winning the Nobel Prize for literature, Mailer certainly excelled as a non-fiction writer, too.

Always glad to read someone else who thinks Of a Fire..
is masterful. I came across a review in The Economic Times
where the reviewer, mostly likely a staffer rewriting a press release, refers to Mailer's abandonment of atheism in his old age. Like you, I commented that the assertion was incorrect, and that Mailer had been rather unapologetic about his belief in a Deity, however idiosyncratic, since the early Sixties.