Rating: 
Summary: Response to a question asked in last "review"
Review: Perhaps if the previous reviewer was paying attention he, or she, would have gathered that the "High Holies" were those chosen by HARLOT for those specific tasks which turned out to be (or appear to be) treasonous. Kitteredge's constant references to Alpha and Omega - somewhat parodied by Harrick's titling of his two manuscipts by the same monnikers - were MEANT to be grating. Kitteredge is to be shown for what she is, and her "A&O" theories are part of what makes her attractive to a man like Herrick Hubbard while being herself somewhat self-centered and sometimes disturbed (and disturbing). Mailer is a little deeper than the last reviewer gives him credit for.
Rating: 
Summary: Too long, no ending, and unredeemable characters
Review:
At 1400 pages, this book is about 1000 pages too long, - and on top of that the plot is never resolved. I only kept reading to see what became of "Harlot", - but Mailer saves that for later, evidently.The most torturous element of the book is the collection of wholly unlikeable characters. By the end of the book I didn't care what happened to any of them, - in fact I would have liked the book more if they had all died in a fiery car crash at the end. Mailer tried to portray them as highly intelligent and complex individuals. Toward this end he had the characters wax poetic on a variety of subjects from Christianity to Psychology, but their diatribes came across as overblown, pretentious yammerings which only served to point out that for all their supposed intelligence they couldn't avoid screwing up their own lives and the lives of others. In fact they seemed entirely unaware of the hypocrisy, emptiness and idiocy they epitomized (and I don't think Mailer intended for me to regard them this way). As for the CIA, while the story might be an accurate depiction, it draws a picture of a disfunctional organization that I found laughable. Grandiose and ill-conceived operations such as their plans to assasinate Castro, ultimately fail in true Wylie Coyote-ish fashion. And Mailer's CIA, apparently is composed mostly of bisexuals from east coast prep schools. None of the male characters can have a relationship with another male without the thought or act of sex coming into play. Who knows, - maybe CIA operatives in the 60's were all bisexual, but I got the impression that it was merely a projection of Mailer's (is he gay/bisexual?) that, for me, detracted from the believability of the story. This book represents 30 hours of my life that I'll never get back. Needless to say, I won't be reading the sequel if it ever comes out (Did it already come out? Is Mailer still even alive? My ambivilence shows itself). The second star is only because I'm an open-minded guy who can acknowledge that others apparently liked the book for some reason.
Rating: 
Summary: Unfair Considerations of a masterpiece.
Review: A lot of these other reviews have rather unfairly criticised the length of Harlot's Ghost. To me, without doubt, it is the one of the greatest books ever written. Mailer's characterisation is always strong, and especially, I feel, with the Naked and the Dead and Harlot's Ghost. In fact, when you compare the two, the similarities become clear - the "masterful introspection of the American male". Yes, I would definitely say that those two novels are his best. Consider the frankly superb relationship between Cummings and Hearn in 'Naked...' - it is as profound as that of Harlot and Harry in the later novel. In short, if you liked either you will love them together, as I did.
Rating:
Summary: POSSIBLE MOVIE MATERIAL
Review: HARLOT'S GHOST A novel by Norman Mailer
Synopsis by Steven Travers Screenwriter Steven Travers proposes adapting Norman Mailer's magnum opus, "Harlot's Ghost", into a blockbuster screenplay. The story revolves around Herrick "Harry" Hubbard. Harry was raised to become a crack CIA agent. His father is a career Company man, and he comes under the wing of his Godfather and mentor, Hugh Tremont Montague (bases on James Jesus Angleton). Montague, also known as Harlot, shepherds him through the Ivy League and into the cloistered, early 1950s world of the Central Intelligence Agency. A battle for Harry's "soul" occurs between his father and Harlot. Harry falls in love with the beautiful and redoubtable Kitteredge, who has also come under Harlot's spell. Kitteredge becomes a CIA psycho-analyst, charged with getting to the root of male-female differences by studying the Alpha and Omega of human personality. She marries the older Harlot, and has a long affair with Harry, all of it supposedly kept "secret" from Harlot. Harry matures into a top CIA operative. His station assignments take him to Latin America, where the Company orchestrates political overthrows and fights a desperate propaganda war against Communist insurgents. The CIA in the 1950s is composed of pipe-smoking, tweed-coated Ivy Leaguers obsessed with defeating atheistic Marxist-Stalinists in every corner of the globe. They go by a staunch code of Episcopalian Christianity, convinced beyond all doubt that they fight on the side of good against the worst possible evil. They are the new Church of America, where the secrets are kept. Harry's assignments range from Latin America to Berlin to Washington, D.C. to the Bay of Pigs. He works closely with real-life historical figures, such as Watergate "plumber" E. Howard Hunt. He is directed to start an affair with a beautiful femme fatale based on Judith Campbell Exner, and becomes a CIA liaison/spy between the Company, John F. Kennedy and a Sam Giancana character. Eventually, Kitteredge divorces Harlot and marries Harry. Harlot dies in mysterious circumstances, just as Harry is learning of a nefarious plot to assassinate President Kennedy. His failed attempts to get to the bottom of the assassination plans before they are carried out, mixed with his "taking" the young wife from his mentor, represent the loss of innocence in an end-of-Camelot scenario.
Rating:
Summary: Some good stuff
Review: I admit I didn't read it all. As a critic wrote, "This will be one of the great unread bestsellers." Well, I did read SOME of it, and actually enjoyed what I read. But when I checked the last page to read the last words of this FAT book are "To be continued," I thought "forget it!" Since the book ended "To be continued" anyway, why didn't Mailer and his publishers just cut this book up into three smaller volumes, and publish one volume a year? They would have made more money, and it would have made for more palatable reading for readers like me. Anyway, you've at least got to read the famously ungrammatical opening sentence, where it looks like a person named Recollections is driving through the fog. Who is this fellow named "recollections?" Mailer, of course, wouldn't allow it to be corrected in subsequent printings, "I like how the sentence hangs there," he said. Let anyone who ever scored a "D" on a grammar exam like me be reassured!
Rating:
Summary: Harlot's Ghost - the book that got me reading again
Review: I had pretty much given up reading novels because my wife and I purchased an old row house in the District of Columbia, and the renovation, which we did ourselves and which took about seven years, left little time for reading. If the book didn't have to do with stripping paint or laying tile, it had to wait until next year or the year after, or the year after that. When that year finally came, I mentioned to a friend, Kathleen Burns, that I was ready to tackle a novel and she said to start with Harlots Ghost because it was wonderful. Not 2 weeks later, while vacationing in the Smokey Moutains, I happened to be browsing in a discount book store in Pigeon Ford, and there it was, this huge book for next to nothing, maybe 5 bucks. Well I bought it, started reading, and low and behold, my passion for reading was reborn. Thank you Mister Mailer and Kathleen Burns. It's great novel, impossible to put down, though you'll have to from time to time due to it's length. I recommend to anyone who enjoys good writing.
Rating:
Summary: Thorough, interesting, but verbose at times
Review: If you are a Mailer fan, you know he can go a bit overboard on his descriptions. His verbosity and the missing sequel are the only shortcomings of Harlot's Ghost, (1991), which is otherwise a Tour de Force in Mailer's favorite style: the novel as history. In this novel, which is as close to non-fiction as it gets, Mailer closely mirrors the events that were the pinnacle of the Cold War: the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the assassination of JFK. It is a must-read if you want an almost eye-witness account of this hyper-anticommunist/Soviet period. He offers insight into the Cuban-exile mentality, the Warren Commission, the failure of foreign policy to deal with Castro, the philandering ways of JFK, Sinatra's mob ties, along with an unbelievably detailed description of the inner workings of the CIA. The 1289 pages read a bit slow, but are woven incredibly with a story line that leaves one waiting for the sequel, which I hope comes soon. If you crave closure, and have never read Mailer, pick up Executioner's Song. If not, grab this and The Naked and the Dead and wait with me.
Rating:
Summary: A partly-failed book, better than most successes.
Review: No final review can be given of Harlot's Ghost since it is apparently only the first part of a continuing novel. Like The Deer Park and Ancient Evenings, this novel is alternately brilliant and frustrating. It is full of great writing (the mountain climbing sequences, for instance) yet also full of long passages that feel strangely lifeless and obligatory (the sections involving JFK are surprisingly muffled and unsuccessful). Mailer's style almost always revives when he has extended scenes to play out, but too much of the book passes in summary form, with drab overviews of months and years filling page after page. The epistolary sections between the narrator and his future wife also fall rather flat, and there are so many of them that they feel a bit lazy, as if Mailer were giving himself a rest from sustaining the usual level of the narrative. At the same time, the tentative and somewhat bland tone of much of this book seems to be deliberate, a set-up for the not-yet-published second half of the story. The narrator is still a young man when this volume of Harlot's Ghost ends, and there are strong suggestions that his general conservatism and dullness will give way to something more complex and interesting later. As far as I know, Mailer has given no precise idea of what form the novel's continuation will take, but this volume at least promises that a potential masterpiece is possible. If anyone knows more about the continuation and when it might appear, please tell me.
Rating:
Summary: Mailer's Masterpiece - on many levels
Review: Norman Mailer has produced a profound work in Harlot's Ghost. The research alone must have taken him in, around, and through some of the deepest levels and recesses of the intelligence 'industry'. As much a work of historical NON-fiction as fiction (as some other reviewer so aptly put it), Mailer basically writes one of the definitive 'inside' novels of the CIA. Anyone who has studied American Intelligence history, both overt and covert, since the National Security Act created the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947, has to be mightily impressed with how much Mailer gets across without actually coming out and being too obvious; though, Dix Butler surely parallels "Rip" Robertson...Montegue is more than a vague parallel of Angleton, and, perhaps my favorite, the double parallel, Mo-dene Murphy, a combination of Judith Exner, and a play on words at the same time. What really strikes me as brilliant about Mailer's novel is his ability to tell a basically true to life expose/story on a subject which nobody could have gotten away with in any other fashion. A long read, yes, but I was never bored; in fact, I have read the novel three times over the past ten years. I sincerely hope Mailer finds the time - certainly the material is there now more than ever - to give us another installment of this "to be continued" novel. As far as I'm concerned, his time would have been beter spent on this than the total flop on Oswald...
Rating: 
Summary: Long and slow, this is for Mailer fans only
Review: Sorry, but if you found this book "compelling and riveting" or "reads like bullet train" then you lead a boring life. As I neared the final 300 pages I had to actually make an effort to want to read this book.
Page after page of pointless letters to different women bored me, or even worse were the transciptions of conversations between Modene and Willie. Kittredge's constant references to "Alpha" and "Omega" made me hate her more and more. The cryptic letters to/from his father and Harlot at least kept me somewhat interested. When did things fall apart completely with Harlot? How did it transpire? Where are the clues that lead to the conflict that we actually read about at the beginning of the book? There aren't any. We learn that Harry isn't really all that bright...at least not in comparison to the other agency types. And we don't ever find out what the "High Holies" are. Why mention them so much?! Sheesh, that REALLY annoyed me! The beginning of the book really did capture my interest. But around the middle it just started to die. I continued on, hoping that pieces would eventually come together...but there are more WMDs in Iraq than any ties in this story!
Mailer seemed to repeatedly describe homoerotic scenes that just got annoying. Why, you ask? Because those descriptions, the detail that he went into, had NOTHING to do with the story. Of course, being that I had a difficult time finding the POINT of this story, who knows...maybe it has a lot to do with the story.
I can't express enough just how disappointed I was with this book.
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