TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/093091/0930991.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.0 KB | 119 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 70

Harlot's Ghost: A Ghastly Tale


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, some
times 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.