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.