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Harlot's Ghost: A Novel

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Mailer's C.I.A., it must be noted, is very strong in the humanities. The talk here is full of erudite references to Alexander Calder, Henry Miller, Henry James, Hemingway, Melville, Kant, Lautreamont, Joyce, Kierkegaard, the Oxford English Dictionary, The FBI and the CIA do employ undercover men of terrible character?’ And Allen Dulles, in all the bonhomie of a good fellow who can summon up the services of a multitude of street ruffians, replied, ‘Yes, terribly bad characters.’

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 Louis XVIII died, in possession of secrets which will remain secret from the best-informed historians. The struggle between the General Police of the Kingdom and the Counter-Police of the King gave rise to dreadful affairs whose secret was hushed on more than one scaffold. most of this up, then bend it to fit in with his fictional characters -- who tend to pale by comparison -- only to end up with an arbitrary, lopsided, lumpy novel that outstays its welcome. And keeps on outstaying 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 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,

us an aria with carefully chosen dissonances?" Hugh gets grander and grander, but Harry's reactions may be grandest of all -- as when Hugh's use of the word "artist" for a counterspy elicits from his discipleFaulkner upon their passing. It is comforting to think that C.I.A. personnel, no longer needed as cold war fighters against a now democratic Soviet Union, will be able to slip easefully into a new role as preservers of humanistic culture. Next, in Part Four, Harry is posted to Montevideo, Uruguay, where he is no longer an apprentice as in Berlin, but a budding spymaster working under none other than E. Howard Hunt, a formidable figure whose "long pointed nose had an indentation just

The ultimate power becomes the ability to kill others ("the sense of realization you can get killing another human,""There's an awful fascination to be found in eliminating one's fellow man"), the sexual pinnacle is to have

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 Harry's education in Uruguay ends, and he is transferred to Miami for Parts Five and Six, dealing respectively with the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis, leading up to Operation Mongoose, the attempt, between 1961 and 1963, to eliminate Castro Exec producing alongside Rochant, are Mark Gordon and Bonnie-Chance Roberts. Mailer’s sons, Michael Mailer and John Buffalo Mailer, will serve as consulting producers. commonweal over to man, not God. A disaster. God, not man, has to be the judge. I will always believe that. I also believe that even at my worst, I am still working, always working, as a soldier of God." --

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 heads into his unflushed toilet bowl. As she says, "With Dix Butler, I can't explain why, I feel very close to Christ." 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, 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 epistolary novel, diary novel, phone-call novel, gossip-column novel, philosophico-political novel, pornographic novel and adventure story rotate into our field of vision. He comes closest to another highly gifted, overexuberantabove the tip that suggested a good deal of purpose in his trigger finger." One would have to be a graduate of the C.I.A. to figure out that connection. In any case, Harry thrives at the cold war game, Western hemisphere style.

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