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Title: Harlot's Ghost by Norman Mailer ISBN: 0-394-58832-0 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 02 October, 1991 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.4 (35 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A partly-failed book, better than most successes.
Comment: No final review can be given of Harlot's Ghost since it is apparently only the first part of a continuing novel. Like The Deer Park and Ancient Evenings, this novel is alternately brilliant and frustrating. It is full of great writing (the mountain climbing sequences, for instance) yet also full of long passages that feel strangely lifeless and obligatory (the sections involving JFK are surprisingly muffled and unsuccessful). Mailer's style almost always revives when he has extended scenes to play out, but too much of the book passes in summary form, with drab overviews of months and years filling page after page. The epistolary sections between the narrator and his future wife also fall rather flat, and there are so many of them that they feel a bit lazy, as if Mailer were giving himself a rest from sustaining the usual level of the narrative. At the same time, the tentative and somewhat bland tone of much of this book seems to be deliberate, a set-up for the not-yet-published second half of the story. The narrator is still a young man when this volume of Harlot's Ghost ends, and there are strong suggestions that his general conservatism and dullness will give way to something more complex and interesting later. As far as I know, Mailer has given no precise idea of what form the novel's continuation will take, but this volume at least promises that a potential masterpiece is possible. If anyone knows more about the continuation and when it might appear, please tell me.
Rating: 5
Summary: Mailer's Masterpiece - on many levels
Comment: Norman Mailer has produced a profound work in Harlot's Ghost. The research alone must have taken him in, around, and through some of the deepest levels and recesses of the intelligence 'industry'. As much a work of historical NON-fiction as fiction (as some other reviewer so aptly put it), Mailer basically writes one of the definitive 'inside' novels of the CIA. Anyone who has studied American Intelligence history, both overt and covert, since the National Security Act created the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, has to be mightily impressed with how much Mailer gets across without actually coming out and being too obvious; though, Dix Butler surely parallels "Rip" Robertson...Montegue is more than a vague parallel of Angleton, and, perhaps my favorite, the double parallel, Mo-dene Murphy, a combination of Judith Exner, and a play on words at the same time. What really strikes me as brilliant about Mailer's novel is his ability to tell a basically true to life expose/story on a subject which nobody could have gotten away with in any other fashion. A long read, yes, but I was never bored; in fact, I have read the novel three times over the past ten years. I sincerely hope Mailer finds the time - certainly the material is there now more than ever - to give us another installment of this "to be continued" novel. As far as I'm concerned, his time would have been beter spent on this than the total flop on Oswald...
Rating: 5
Summary: POSSIBLE MOVIE MATERIAL
Comment: HARLOT'S GHOST
A novel by Norman Mailer
Synopsis by Steven Travers
Screenwriter Steven Travers proposes adapting Norman Mailer's magnum opus, "Harlot's Ghost", into a blockbuster screenplay. The story revolves around Herrick "Harry" Hubbard. Harry was raised to become a crack CIA agent. His father is a career Company man, and he comes under the wing of his Godfather and mentor, Hugh Tremont Montague (bases on James Jesus Angleton). Montague, also known as Harlot, shepherds him through the Ivy League and into the cloistered, early 1950s world of the Central Intelligence Agency. A battle for Harry's "soul" occurs between his father and Harlot.
Harry falls in love with the beautiful and redoubtable Kitteredge, who has also come under Harlot's spell. Kitteredge becomes a CIA psycho-analyst, charged with getting to the root of male-female differences by studying the Alpha and Omega of human personality. She marries the older Harlot, and has a long affair with Harry, all of it supposedly kept "secret" from Harlot.
Harry matures into a top CIA operative. His station assignments take him to Latin America, where the Company orchestrates political overthrows and fights a desperate propaganda war against Communist insurgents. The CIA in the 1950s is composed of pipe-smoking, tweed-coated Ivy Leaguers obsessed with defeating atheistic Marxist-Stalinists in every corner of the globe. They go by a staunch code of Episcopalian Christianity, convinced beyond all doubt that they fight on the side of good against the worst possible evil. They are the new Church of America, where the secrets are kept.
Harry's assignments range from Latin America to Berlin to Washington, D.C. to the Bay of Pigs. He works closely with real-life historical figures, such as Watergate "plumber" E. Howard Hunt. He is directed to start an affair with a beautiful femme fatale based on Judith Campbell Exner, and becomes a CIA liaison/spy between the Company, John F. Kennedy and a Sam Giancana character.
Eventually, Kitteredge divorces Harlot and marries Harry. Harlot dies in mysterious circumstances, just as Harry is learning of a nefarious plot to assassinate President Kennedy. His failed attempts to get to the bottom of the assassination plans before they are carried out, mixed with his "taking" the young wife from his mentor, represent the loss of innocence in an end-of-Camelot scenario.
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Title: The Spooky Art : Some Thoughts on Writing by Norman Mailer ISBN: 0394536487 Publisher: Random House Pub. Date: 21 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Gospel According to the Son by NORMAN MAILER ISBN: 0345421329 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 28 January, 1998 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: UNDERWORLD: A NOVEL by Don DeLillo ISBN: 0684848155 Publisher: Scribner Pub. Date: 09 July, 1998 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: The Company: A Novel of the CIA by Robert Littell ISBN: 0142002623 Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 25 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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