Books

By Paul Gray

At first glance Norman Mailer's much anticipated and superhyped new novel beggars description. Saying, for openers, that it is very, very long is like observing that the Grand Canyon is quite roomy. The next step is to point out that mind-boggling immensity seems to be one of the points of the exercise. Mailer's narrator, an aging CIA hand named Herrick ("Harry") Hubbard, who has written the two manuscripts that make up the bulk of Harlot's Ghost (Random House; 1,310 pages; $30), notes that he has been guided by Thomas Mann's assertion "Only the exhaustive is truly interesting." By that standard alone, Harry and Mailer have produced the most interesting book in recent memory.

! Unfortunately, other criteria for engaging a reader's attention also exist: plot, suspense, characterization, dialogue, effective prose. In all these areas, Harlot's Ghost runs into serious difficulties, sometimes intermittently, sometimes over the long haul. No one can deny Mailer's monumental ambition in this novel or his dedication to the hard, slogging work that writing an enormous narrative entails. What can be questioned is whether his fundamental premise -- a fictional history of a real Central Intelligence Agency -- was not misconceived from the beginning.

For the first 100 pages or so, facts hardly impinge on a burst of bravura storytelling. Harry recounts his drive, on a chilly night in March 1983, from a sexual tryst with a waitress at a roadside restaurant back to the Keep, his ancestral home on an island off the Maine seacoast. For complicated genealogical reasons, the house is now owned by his aristocratic wife Kittredge (full name: Hadley Kittredge Gardiner), who was formerly married to Hugh Tremont Montague, Harry's godfather and mentor at the CIA.

Harlot, as Montague insists on being called by close associates, has been crippled by a rock-climbing fall that killed his and Kittredge's only child, a teenage son. Though in a wheelchair, Harlot has forgiven Harry's betrayal with Kittredge sufficiently to enlist him in a top-secret investigation of the agency; both are trying to learn about "the High Holies," a code name for a possible CIA subplot to amass funding secretly by tapping into the deliberations of the Federal Reserve Board. As Harlot explains to Harry, "Advance information on when the Federal Reserve is going to shift the interest rate is worth, conservatively, a good many billions."

And then, already guilty over his infidelity earlier on that March night, Harry hears shocking news, both from his wife and from a CIA crony who has materialized in the house: Harlot's body has washed up in Chesapeake Bay, most of his head blown away by a shotgun blast. Who killed Harlot? Himself? The KGB? A rogue enclave within the CIA that is now on its way to murder Harry? Still another possibility exists: the body was an elaborate plant and Harlot is happily on his way to Moscow, bearing a career's worth of invaluable secrets.

This long opening riff is fine and engaging, comparable to the best passages -- fictional or otherwise -- that Mailer has ever written. Harry's narrative sails forward on a river of Scotch, melodrama, sex, paranoia and typically Mailerian metaphysics (Harry knows why his waitress-girlfriend was so pleasant to him the first time she worked his table: "She saw money coming in all kinds of emotional flavors. It took happy money to buy a dependable appliance"). At the end of all these pyrotechnical effects, which include a persuasively real ghost in Harry's basement, the hero has achieved some pressing problems and his narrative some genuine tension.

So what happens next? Well, Harry hides out in the Bronx for a year, writing up the account of this momentous night, and then takes off for Moscow, where he rents a hotel room and reads the 2,000 microfilmed pages of the typed manuscript he has been composing for years about his life and the CIA. While Harry does this, so must everyone else who has been lured into his predicament, since there is now nothing else but this history going on in Harlot's Ghost.

Here is where a joyride turns into a forced march. Harry shackles himself to chronology: his privileged upbringing, his prep schools, his Yale, his initiation into the CIA, his subsequent postings to the world's hot spots -- Berlin in 1956, Latin America in the late '50s, South Florida during the U.S. Castromania of the early '60s. To certify his authenticity, Harry begins quoting extensively from letters he wrote and received, from interoffice memos, cable traffic and transcripts of bugged or wiretapped conversations. Mailer has invented all these reams of evidence, of course, but they come tricked out to look just as mundane and quotidian as the real things.

Toward the end of his history, Harry inserts a diary he kept during the weeks leading up to the Bay of Pigs fiasco in April 1961. Some 60 pages of documentation follow, recording in minute detail, sometimes hour by hour, the preparations for this doomed venture. The trouble is, all this information has been in the public record for several decades. The only new twist that Harlot's Ghost brings to this old story is Harry's anxiety that his CIA colleagues will learn he is keeping an unauthorized record of the proceedings. And this road leads to unintentional comedy: "I am back in the loo, writing away."

Something has clearly gone wrong here. Mailer finally does not use history but succumbs to it. Those who want to read about the real CIA can profitably dip into some of the more than 80 books the author lists in a bibliography at the end. Those eager to read Norman Mailer, his unique imagination and ( intellect reshaping the known world, should read the opening pages of Harlot's Ghost and hope, someday, for more of the same.