Word: mailerian
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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...
This long opening riff is fine and engaging, comparable to the best passages -- fictional or otherwise -- that Mailer has ever written. Harry's narrative sails forward on a river of Scotch, melodrama, sex, paranoia and typically Mailerian metaphysics (Harry 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...
...author does her bit to change this condition with a work of social criticism hat reads like a novel, though she makes no Mailerian claims for the achievement. She heartily dislikes Tarnower, his "repilian" face, his dictatorial and unimaginative diet book and his Westchester, N.Y., house, which she finds "Japanoid" and "claustral." From testimony and private conversation, she concludes that the cardiologist was "a small-time emotional imperialist," and "a glutton for other people's vulnerabilities." She gleefully notes that he took a nightly laxative mixed with applesauce and that, according to the autopsy report, the deceased was overweight...
Mailer has tested this magic on the Viet Nam War, American presidential politics, the women's movement, the moon program. He tries it now upon another American public event that possessed, even before he wrote about it, a certain Mailerian quality: the execution, early in 1977, of Gary Gilmore, 36, a Utah murderer who refused to appeal his conviction and death sentence and demanded that the state kill him. Utah obliged, but only after a ritual that turned Gilmore into a grotesque celebrity. Shortly before the prisoner was seated in front of a dirty mattress to face the firing...
...George of the book's title then at least a minister of one of the two political parties that Mailer sees as possibly "the true churches of America." Yet McGovern and his followers have for Mailer both an unbecoming air of innocence and an insufficiency of evil. In Mailerian terms, this usually means a lack of recognition of the demoniac part of human nature...