Feeling the Truth

CANNIBALS AND CHRISTIANS by Norman Mailer. 400 pages. Dial. $5.95.

Norman Mailer writes so obsessively, and says so many silly things, that the crowds he draws have learned to come with their pockets full of ripe eggs. He makes an irresistible target, like a Hyde Park orator who seems to ask for, if not necessarily to deserve, just what he gets. It is worth noting, however, that he always gets a crowd.

The literary firing line will probably pepper his latest book, which presents targets in gratifying profusion. Cannibals and Christians is mostly warmed-over Mailer: a scatter of pseudo poems (he calls them "short hairs"), essays, dialectic, sermonizing, book reviews, literary criticism and political reportage. The principal new material is some italicized mortar troweled in to support the notion that this pile of used bricks rose and took form from a blue print, which of course it did not.

His short hairs are best ignored. His excursions into philosophy, all taken in Jean-Paul Sartre's second-class compartment, begin at the level of the college bull session and follow a descending route. "Coitus interruptus is evil," announces Mailer in the course of a Playboy magazine panel discussion on sex. Food has a soul, he writes; fresh food has more soul than canned food. Terminal cancer cases can be arrested by reading William Burroughs: "Bet money on that." The now-notorious Mailer sense of smell, which got such a bloodhound workout in his last novel, An American Dream, now concentrates on the bowel: man's nature, he says, can be divined in "the color, the shape, the odor and the movement" of his stool.

The reader must wade through yards and yards of such silly stuff to find anything really worth rereading: a devastatingly unchivalrous--and perceptive--examination of Mary McCarthy's The Group, an equally perceptive report on the 1964 Republican National Convention, a quick survey of contemporary fiction that should rank Mailer among the better critics today.

If he is also self-indulgent ("Some of the best prose in America is graffiti found on men's-room walls"), it is probably because, as he says, "I feel the truth of the thing first and discover the explanations later." Such candor is hard to ignore.

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