Word: ghosting
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...HARLOT'S GHOST by Norman Mailer (Random House; $30). This huge (1,300-plus pages) novel starts off briskly with some Mailerian melodrama and metaphysics and then bogs down in a recapitulation of one man's life in the CIA from the middle 1950s to the early '60s. It ends with the three most ominous words in recent American literature: "TO BE CONTINUED...
...knows why his waitress-girlfriend was so pleasant to him the first time she worked his table: "She saw money coming in all kinds of emotional flavors. It took happy money to buy a dependable appliance"). At the end of all these pyrotechnical effects, which include a persuasively real ghost in Harry's basement, the hero has achieved some pressing problems and his narrative some genuine tension...
...microfilmed pages of the typed manuscript he has been composing for years about his life and the CIA. While Harry does this, so must everyone else who has been lured into his predicament, since there is now nothing else but this history going on in Harlot's Ghost...
...Pigs fiasco in April 1961. Some 60 pages of documentation follow, recording in minute detail, sometimes hour by hour, the preparations for this doomed venture. The trouble is, all this information has been in the public record for several decades. The only new twist that Harlot's Ghost brings to this old story is Harry's anxiety that his CIA colleagues will learn he is keeping an unauthorized record of the proceedings. And this road leads to unintentional comedy: "I am back in the loo, writing away...
...read about the real CIA can profitably dip into some of the more than 80 books the author lists in a bibliography at the end. Those eager to read Norman Mailer, his unique imagination and ( intellect reshaping the known world, should read the opening pages of Harlot's Ghost and hope, someday, for more of the same...