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FICTION: Ancient Evenings, Norman Mailer ∙Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Gabriel Garcia Mdrquez Heartburn, Nora Ephron Ironweed, William Kennedy Pilgermann, Russell Hoban ∙Sister Age, M.F.K. Fisher
...NORMAN MAILER '43 had to write this brick of a book. After all that grand talk and those grandstanding performances in which he told how he could go so many rounds in the rings with the heavyweights--Tolstoy and Hemingway and God knows who else--he was compelled to write a truly big book. Size alone, of course, was not the only requirement, though, to be sure, Mailer had in mind a book that the eye might train on, even on a shelf with Melville, Prost, and Dostoyevsky. No, more than that, the book would have...
What better way to make good on all those boasts than by writing about ancient Egypt? That's about as far back and as far away as one can go and still have a culture to work with (not even Mailer would try to make a literary One Million Years, B.C.). Inventing almost completely an exotic and complex world so far removed from modern consciousness would provide the necessary feat of imagination to fill out Mailer's corpus. Nothing less than this sort of overweening ambition could have caused the mess of Ancient Evenings...
...shrift for a major novel by one of America's foremost writers, well, it is. The book: as you might have guessed by now, is painfully bad. The writing tries to mimic the Biblical cadence which translators often give to old, mythic stories and hence seems gimmicky, especially with Mailer's consuming interest in sex and scatology (an important episode in the book comes when Menenhetet steals some of the Pharaoh's feces, I swear). But even more annoying than the problems in execution, the concerns of the book, and its vacillation between comic book heroism and pornography...
This irrelevancy is itself somewhat interesting when one considers Mailer's career. I can only guess that after Mailer's powerful and fruitful engagement in public affairs in the '50s and '60s, the much discussed stagnation of the '70s finally filled him with boredom, a boredom with society that festered even as he wrote the Marilyn Monroe books and The Executioner's Song. A desire to get the heavyweight crown for imagination was probably not the only thing that drove him to Egypt. Disaffection and disgust could well have had a lot to do with it. Mailer may have imagination...