And Now, the Book

By P.G.

Throughout his intense immersion in the time of his times, Norman Mailer has repeated his conviction that making history is preferable to reading it. In his influential essay "The White Negro" (1957), Mailer turned the emerging social type known as the hipster into a daring pioneer adrift in "the perpetual climax of the present," freed of all moral guides and codes of conduct except the thrumming of his own nervous system. The author specifically disavowed any precedents for this existential frame of mind: "If the ethic reduces to Know Thyself and Be Thyself, what makes it radically different from Socratic moderation with its stern conservative respect for the experience of the past is that the Hip ethic is immoderation, childlike in its adoration of the present (and indeed to respect the past means that one must also respect such ugly consequences of the past as the collective murders of the State)."

Mailer not only defined this consciousness but became its chief public spokesman and exemplar. His career evolved as a series of highly visible acts, literary and personal, performed according to what he took to be the imperatives of the moment: write a book, direct a film, run for office, put up your dukes. History, Mailer said in 1980, "is not history, but a series of immensely sober novels written by men who often don't have large literary talents, and have less to say about the real world than novelists."

Given his antipathy toward the outdated, Ancient Evenings (Little, Brown; 709 pages; $19.95) is hands down the most surprising work Mailer has ever offered. It really is set entirely in an alien long ago, just as the author had been promising during the decade he took to write it. Yet no amount of advance speculation proves adequate to the thing itself: an artifact of evident craftsmanship and utterly invisible significance.

A lengthy journey begins with the agonies of death ("Volcanic lips give fire, wells bubble. Bone lies like rubble upon the wound"). Surviving this fiery purgation is the ka (diminished soul) of an Egyptian named Menenhetet II. After experiencing the mummification of his discarded body, this ghost meets the kindred spirit of his great-grandfather Menenhetet I. The old ghost agrees to guide his descendant out of the necropolis at Memphi, a task that begins with a lesson in the creation of the Egyptian deities. Toward the end of this recitation, the young shade's attention drifts into the eddy of a memory from the sixth year of his corporal life, when he, his parents and great-grandfather spent a night in the presence of the Pharaoh Ramses IX.

That name historically fixes the meeting around 1130 B.C., on a special occasion called the Night of the Pig, when the truth is to be spoken by all parties regardless of rank and with no fear of the consequences that could make honest talk fatal the rest of the year. What the Pharaoh wants to hear is the life stories of the elder Menenhetet, who has discovered a means of self-propagation by dying during the act of intercourse and transferring himself to his lover's womb. Menenhetet warns: "My story must be long like the length of the snake." The Pharaoh has no other plans for the rest of the night and encourages the old eyewitness to proceed "as slowly as you wish."

The book is already some 230 pages old when Menenhetet I eases into this narration, and none of the characters seems in any hurry to pick up the pace. Worse, Mailer shuns the devices that can make long pieces of fiction irresistible. Suspense is banished: everything has already happened in Ancient Evenings, not only historically, but also in the lives of its people. Nothing is surprising, except perhaps how polymorphously perverse and consistently swinish the ancients were, according to their newest historian.

Nor is there a clash of vivid personalities. The young Menenhetet, age 6, has the ability to enter the minds of those around him, a power he shares, it turns out, with his mother and great-grandfather. What this means, in practice, is that mystery becomes unnecessary. Whenever one character wonders what another is thinking or feeling, telepathy comes instantly to the rescue. Different people are simply parcels of the same brain, one that usually resembles Norman Mailer's. Menenhetet I often sounds like the world's oldest existentialist: "Look for the risk. We must obey it every time. There is no credit to be drawn from the virtue of one's past." This figure has given much thought during his lives to the mysterious, possibly magic properties of human excrement, a topic that Mailer has pondered in an essay called "The Metaphysics of the Belly" and in various interviews. The purpose of Menenhetet's research, he tells Ramses IX, is "to enrich the marrow of our failing lands," a task reminiscent of the "great mission" that Mailer took up on behalf of his country in the 1950s: "to save the nerve of Being."

Language might yet have made Ancient Evenings a page turner, and the novel does offer brief, poetic passages. The shimmer and heat of the Nile, the blaze of Egyptian architecture when it was new and radiant with epochal ambition, the perfume and soft light of a harem garden: all enjoy moments of intense realization. But such moods are continually broken by ludicrous sentences: "In either case, my Pharaoh's mind was now concerned with buttocks." Or: "Now, with the redolence of my nose, I watched and admired the delicacy with which the Pharaoh ate." Mailer's historical posing stalls an already leisurely narration. What gods were cited as witnesses to a treaty between the Egyptians and Hittites? "The God of Zeyetheklirer, the Gods of Kerzot, the God of Kherpenteres, the Goddess of the city of Kerephen, the Goddess of Khewek, the Goddess of Zen, the God of Zen, the God of Serep, the God of Khenbet..."

The sex in the book is equally droning. The penile principle predominates; it is the staff of life and the stuff of seemingly endless repetition. Pharaohs spontaneously impose themselves on the underling, male or female, who happens to be closest. Indiscriminate rutting is a sign of power, sodomy the proof of triumph. Male-on-male copulation, in particular, becomes so predictable that the nonexplicit stretches of narrative come as moments of noncomic relief.

Mailer is a member of the postwar generation of writers who still believed in the possibility of the Great American Novel. This notion always flirted with silliness, but its power to spur the ambition of young authors cannot be discounted. The paradox of Mailer's career is that his pursuit of this white whale proved the quest in his case unnecessary. He became a major writer without becoming a major novelist. His instinct to abandon fiction for long periods was, given his talents and temperament, entirely correct. His unique value among his contemporaries proved to be the witness he could bear to his age and its possible consequences. His energy and imagination have been aroused most keenly by doubt, the sense that every act, individual and civic, leads perilously into the unknown. Looking backward is not the job such a mind performs best, as Ancient Evenings proves. The book is a gesture of obeisance to graven images and an abstract ideal, dutifully performed by an inherently disruptive spirit. --P.G. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.