Word: mailer
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...doing riffs on his own horn ("I'm one of the people that people fight over . . . It's just possible I am the voice of the coming age"), he was appraising fellow authors with faint damns. "What's the point of talking as if I were Mailer or Updike?" he demanded. "I don't have the guts they have. I could defend myself by saying that they're not carrying so dangerous a message, but maybe I'm flattering myself...
EDGE (PBS, Nov. 6 and 10 on most stations). PBS's new monthly magazine series on pop culture, with host Robert Krulwich, enlivens some familiar topics (Grateful Dead fanatics, Norman Mailer's new novel) with personal points of view from such contributors as Buck Henry and critic James Wolcott...
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...
Something has clearly gone wrong here. Mailer finally does not use history but succumbs to it. Those who want to 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...
BOOKS Norman Mailer can still punch, but his new book is a weak...