Harlot's Ghost: A Novel

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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. Yet this gruff, stupid masculine world is set on its ears by one courtesan. ‘Modene Murphy’, who is Mailer’s greatest failure of characterisation here, is perhaps such a failure because she has to do so much duty. In the novel as in life, she has to supply the carnal link between JFK, Frank Sinatra and the mob leader Sam Giancana. (Ben Bradlee, JFK’s hagiographer and confidant, says that one of the worst moments of his life came when he saw the diaries of Judith Campbell Exner and found that she did indeed, as she had claimed, have the private telephone codes of the JFK White House, which changed every weekend.)

Part Two takes us to Berlin, where Harry becomes Harvey's assistant, beneficiary of his confidences as well as of his rages, during which this walking arsenal with weapons secreted all over his anatomy imperils anyone near him. Harvey's pride Always look to the language. We’ve built a foundation for ourselves almost as good as a directive. “Subvert military leaders to the point where they will be ready to overthrow Castro”. Well, son, tell me. How do you do that by half?... Always look to the language.’ 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 Castroin the alley between two theaters -- those separate playhouses of paranoia and cynicism. . . . Are [ we ] trying to analyze no more than an error by our opponents, a bureaucratic fumble, a gaffe, or, to the contrary, do we have before

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, and joy is a tunnel he has had secretly dug from West into East Berlin. In this game of espionage and counterespionage, where ex-Nazis may be running the West German equivalent of the C.I.A., and every German is a double agent if not This is not the ‘thin line’ of Draper’s inquiry. Relying almost exclusively on the written record and his skill as a historian, he tries to compose a history of the present. But with knowledge, memory and desire left opaque, and without the promiscuity that is permitted to the freelance speculator, all he can do is show – employing their own words and memos – that the American Constitution was deliberately put at risk by a group of unelected, paranoid Manicheans. This in itself is one of the scholarly achievements of the decade. 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,A good question, but perhaps one that only literature can answer. ‘Critics’– the press, the academics, the think-tankers – do not care to admit that they missed the big story or the big case. Nor do they get their living by making trouble for the Establishment.

The novel — Mailer’s longest — blends reality and fiction and features figures including Richard Nixon, Fidel Castro, Sam Giancana, Bill Harvey and Howard E. Hunt. above 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. Fine phrases about the freedom of the individual and the inviolability of the home were exchanged between the Minister of State and the Prefect, to whom M. de Sérisy pointed out that the major interests of the country sometimes required secret illegalities, crime beginning only when State means were applied to private interests. that, in a particularly harrowing scene, Dix tries, unsuccessfully but deeply affectingly, to rape or seduce the still virginal young man. 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 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

as his eagerness to show off his learning and verbiage. The learning is sketchier than he realizes, the verbiage riddled with grammatical and lexical errors, but the pontification proceeds undaunted: "Our discipline is exerciseda sex operation into womanhood), and plays havoc with the staff of the Soviet Embassy (all K.G.B. types) by bugging the bed in which one high-level Russian conducts a liaison with another one's wife.