Harlot's Ghost

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: 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: 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: 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.

Rating:
Summary: bad book by a bad writer
Review: This sprawling 1,000+ page epic about two generations of CIA officers is difficult to characterize: part history, part period piece, and part fiction. Mailier mixes the comings and goings of historical figures and real events with a well-developed cast of fictional characters in a way that reminds the reader of E.L.Doctorow's masterpiece Ragtime.

Harlot's Ghost impresses as an authentic and comprehensive glimpse inside the inner workings of the CIA. The book's strongest message is that this infamous organization of spooks and bogey-men is no more than the sum of it's parts - the officers and agents - and by giving us a view of their motivations and desires we understand a bit more about how and why the CIA does what it does.

The protagonist, Harry Hubbard, is a second generation CIA officer who bounces around the globe from assignment to assignment, managing to land in each hotspot long enough for us to see the Agency's role through his eyes as events unfold - from Cold War Berlin to the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Enjoyable though this novel is, not everything works. Hovering as a backdrop to all the action is the idea of deceit and duality: East vs. West, intelligence vs. counterintelligence, information vs. misinformation, the means vs. the ends, idealism vs. pragmatism. This theme is captured by the theory of Alpha and Omega - a theory developed by Kitterdge Montague, CIA research psychologist and love interest of Harry Hubbard. The theory, in brief, states that there are two fully formed and competing personalities trapped within every individual, and that the key to human nature is to understanding the relationship between these two personalities. In an early scene a soon-to-be-wed Kittredge offers an elegant explanation of this theory while flirting with Hubbard. The problem is that over the next thousand pages the same theory pops up every ten pages or so, until the reader feels beaten over the head with this particular bit of symbolism. Enough already. We get it.

But overall, this is an immensely enjoyable novel. Mailer creates realistic three-dimensional characters that mingle seamlessly with real historical figures and actual events. Mailer has taken on a hugely ambitious task and manages to pull it off. This is not only a definitive view of the CIA, but an excellent piece of literature as well. Through Hubbard's first person accounts, thoughts, and letters the reader experiences an amazing range of events and environments - from seedy Berlin safe-houses to luxurious Uruguayan villas to combat on the Cuban beachhead.

The book's thousand pages notwithstanding, there are huge questions which Mailer leaves unanswered. Harlot's Ghost would have benefited from a more aggressive editor, but my final analysis is that I'll be the first in line to slog through the sequel to learn the resolution to the questions that the book's "to be continued" ending leaves. Highly recommended.

Note: In the final pages Mailer includes a glossary of names, code-names, events, and places. Very useful for keeping track of the acronyms, aliases, and code-words. I didn't discover the glossary until I was a third through the book; don't make the same mistake.