Harlot's Ghost: A Novel

Product Information

This information can affect you in two ways. You may feel that this epic novel, which means among other things to explain United States foreign policy over the last few decades from the point of view of the Central Intelligence Agency (or, more specifically, and, subsequently, husband of Kittredge, only to be thrown over in turn. (I am not giving away too much, since all of this happens early in the story, which starts with its end, sort of, to progress toward its middle, sort of, with Kittredge. She could have been a horse who had just seen another horse trot by with a dead man in the saddle." Does a horse care? They shoot people, don't they? Large and occult was its arena. Beautiful were the curves of the belly and breast, and eloquent was the harmonium of universal sex." And much, much more, down to such unidiomatic hiccupings as "You are not witting to Swedish

he writes as if privy to the secret thoughts and private conversations of the makers of history, from John F. Kennedy to Fidel Castro, from Allen Dulles to J. Edgar Hoover, from Maj. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale to Howard Hunt, must make

But there are aspects of Mailer's fiction that are less endearing. I am not even thinking of such minor absurdities as the fixation on bodily effluvia and odors (thus the Nazi maid in "An American Dream," whom the hero possesses anally, also integrated that material with his own inventions. These include Harry's correspondence with his mentor, Hugh; another with his platonic beloved, Kittredge; and occasional communications from Arnie Rosen, one of Harry's The C.I.A. does go in for musical analogies. Thus Allen Dulles, from the audience, interrupts Hugh's lecture with an operatic trope for Communist fallibility: "When we have to listen to an awfully vain tenor who can never hit his high note, Berlin and bildungsroman, you say. OK, so he’s a camera: get on with it. But, self-plagiarism apart, I think that Mailer is distilling an important knowledge from his many earlier reflections on violence and perversity and low life. As Balzac knew, and as Dix Butler boasts, the criminal and sexual outlaw world may be anarchic, but it is also servile and deferential. It is, to put it crudely, generally right-wing. It is also for sale. (Berlin has seen this point made before.) Berlin was the place where the CIA, busily engaged in recruiting hard-core ex-Nazis for the Kulturkampf against Moscow, first knew sin. First engaged in prostitution. First thought about frame-ups and tunnels and ‘doubles’ and (good phrase, you have to admit) ‘wet jobs’. More specifically – because this hadn’t been true of its infant OSS predecessor in the Second World War – it first began to conceive of American democracy as a weakling affair, as a potential liability; even as an enemy.

manicly or maniacally, power and sex, i.e., achieving supremacy in some profession such as politics or the military, and possessing the most beautiful women in the world. A Stendhal could make some magisterial fiction even out of this,

This not always successful supersession of the powerful but slightly corrupt father figure has been a paradigm of Mailer's fiction since the start: Lieutenant Hearn and General Cummings in "The Naked and the Dead"; Sergius O'Shaughnessy we do grow fond of him after a time. His very inability finally offers the dependable pleasure." This is true neither to tenors nor to the tone of Allen Dulles -- nor, I should think, to the tenor of C.I.A. discussions; but it

exudes "a thin high constipated smell"; Ingrid, the German bargirl who initiates Harry, has "a thin avaricious smell . . . stingy, catlike"), which reached its apogee in "Ancient Evenings." More troublesome Throughout the book he has a tendency to get carried away with his imagery, as when Hugh, Kittredge and Harry attend one of Lenny Bruce's performances, and suddenly "the most incredible sound issued unexpectedly from

id). It becomes particularly obstreperous and tiresome in "Harlot's Ghost," where Kittredge keeps evolving -- for the C.I.A., no less, but also for her own and Harry's delectation -- a theory of two principles in The Reds, not us, are the evil ones, and so they are clever enough to imply that they are in the true tradition of Christ. . . . The Russians know how to merchandise one crucial commodity: Ideology. Our spiritual offering is