Harlot's Ghost

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A Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. Norman Mailer wrote a 1,000-plus page novel about the CIA, covering the Cold War in Berlin, the Bay of Pigs, and Operation Mongoose, and he made it boring. Through Watergate, the Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis, Mafia, JFK, Marlyn Monroe, Sinatra, Castro, Helms, Dulles, Hoover, all the political dramas of the 50's and 60's, and CIA/FBI rivalry.

The Berlin and Montevideo sections appear meaningless until the Kennedy and other big characters arrive post the halfway mark and the book takes on the Cuban chapters. The author is holding back on revealing the true Harlot power and cunningness - possibly for the sequel that was never written. colleague Cal Hubbard's son, how to climb rocks; he has also watched over Harry's career at the Agency. Without getting into books like Inside the Company: CIA Diary its probably the best you're going to find on the CIA. May I add as a side-note that I now wish to dig up the remains of Herr Mailer, wherever they are interred, assuming they are, and beat them with my house shoe.

I remember the scene where the protagonist and Kittredge walk out of a Lenny Bruce show, offended at his jokes. definitely recommended for anyone who liked Ellroy's American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand, as it uses some of the same historical figures (the Kennedys, Sam Giancana, Hoover, etc. The trio -- all New England blue bloods -- comprises Hugh Tremont Montague, an urbane, icily fascinating, lethal top-level C. Then the book shifts to the first person life story of the protagonist, and after a while I decided it’s too much of an investment of my time, I wasn’t that interested, it’s 1300 pages (I didn’t know they when I started), I had already put in a bunch of hours and was at 19%, shoot me now. Soon things begin to go very wrong: one of Hubbard's colleagues makes a surreptitious visit to the island to deliver the bad news that Hugh Montague, aka "Harlot," Kittredge's former husband and Harry's godfather and CIA mentor, has turned up dead, either as a result of a sailing accident, or murder, or something else.

Mailer comes up with a truly ingenious plot device: Harvey assigns Harry to track down the cryptonymous C. But at the time I thought it was awesome, and I was gratified that Salman Rushdie seemed of all reviewers to *get* the novel: His NYTimes review raved about all the best aspects of the book while acknowledging the weak bits.Mailer's massive novel about the CIA begins in 1983, with the narrator Harry Hubbard and his wife Kittredge on their small private island off the coast of Mount Desert Island in Maine. really magnificent; there were indeed some swaths probably best cut, but awfully few of them for 1300 pages spanning five continents.

A corporate executive from Philadelphia, Bingham Baker, and his family now inhabit the house and seem to thrive on the ghost—at least, all the Bakers look pink-cheeked in church. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The public self, the secret self and the inner conflicts that cloud an agent's ethics and takes over his soul are well-developed in Kittredge, as well as in the characters of Harlot and Harry. Both books cover the same territory, share many of the same characters, and are as large as well-fed babies. Harlot's Ghost," his new novel, runs to more than 1,300 pages, and where you expect to find THE END, you get instead TO BE CONTINUED.Mailer paints all these major historical events with his grandness and knowledge and often thwarts the excitement with his tendency for dullness. The author spends little time in filtering to what he really needed to say, and as a result, the book is at least twice as big as it should have been. It took a while as I frequently tired of his literary method of often telling the story through the exchange of letters between the two main characters.