Word: mailers
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...trustees helped to boost the organization's finances by soliciting contributions from alumni at a posh New York cocktail party. The event was attended by the likes of Robert Bly '50, Louis Begley '54, Norman K. Mailer '43, Conan C. O'Brien '85 and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. '38; alumni gave $50,000 to the Advocate...
...Mailer anticipates and tries to soothe the initial uneasiness that his book will arouse in most of those who pick it up. In the very first chapter, his Jesus writes, "For those who would ask how my words have come to this page, I would tell them to look upon it as a small miracle. (My gospel, after all, will speak of miracles.) Yet I would hope to remain closer to the truth. Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John were seeking to enlarge their fold." In other words, Mailer's Jesus suggests that the New Testament is rife with errors...
...studies have failed to accomplish: present a convincing account of what it may have felt like to be the man Jesus, human like his contemporaries but given a divine vision, mission and fate that they have been spared. But not even the Christ-haunted Dostoyevsky tried to go where Mailer has now rushed...
There are moments in this imagined memoir when the author creates a credible impression of Jesus. Most of these occur early, during the period least thoroughly covered by the four Gospels. Mailer's Jesus writes movingly of his time as an apprentice carpenter: "So my trade became my pride, and I knew respect for the tools in my box. A rasp, a plane, a hammer, an auger, a gimlet, an adze, a cubit rule, a saw, and three chisels for paring, as well as a gouge--all were mine. And my knowledge of how to treat wood became another tool...
...Mailer's Jesus sounds a tad like Ernest Hemingway here, so be it. The flat sentences effectively convey the step-by-step pleasure of learning a trade. The real Jesus may well have had such feelings. Far less successful are the many passages in which Mailer's Jesus sounds quite a bit like Norman Mailer...