Harlot's Ghost: A Novel: Amazon.ca: Norman Mailer: Books

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Book Description

Release Date: Sep 1 1992

"The most daring, ambitious and by far the best written of the several very long, daring and ambitious books Norman Mailer has so far produced....Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book....There can no longer be any doubt that he possesses the largest mind and imagination at work in American literature today."
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Narrated by Harry Hubbard, a second-generation CIA man, HARLOT'S GHOST looks into the depths of the American soul and the soul of Hugh Tremont Montague, code name Harlot, a CIA man obsessed. And Harry is about to discover how far the madness will go and what it means to the Agency and the country....
A Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club

#outer_postBodyPS { display: none; } #psGradient { display: none; } #psPlaceHolder { display: none; } #psExpand { display: none; } "The most daring, ambitious and by far the best written of the several very long, daring and ambitious books Norman Mailer has so far produced....Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book....There can no longer be any doubt that he possesses the largest mind and imagination at work in American literature today."
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Narrated by Harry Hubbard, a second-generation CIA man, HARLOT'S GHOST looks into the depths of the American soul and the soul of Hugh Tremont Montague, code name Harlot, a CIA man obsessed. And Harry is about to discover how far the madness will go and what it means to the Agency and the country....
A Main Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club

Product Details

Paperback: 1168 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (Sep 1 1992)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0345379659
ISBN-13: 978-0345379658
Product Dimensions: 5 x 14 x 21 cm
Shipping Weight: 816 g

Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (34 customer reviews)

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #107,965 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Product Description

From Publishers Weekly

Those who quail at the prospect of a 1400-page novel by the author of Ancient Evenings and Tough Guys Don't Dance need have no fear. Mailer's newest effort, a mammoth imagining of the CIA that puts all previous fictions about the Agency in the shade, reads like an express train. Never has he written more swiftly and surely, more vividly and with less existential clutter. A contemporary picaresque yarn, Harlot's Ghost bears more than a slight resemblance to those great 18th-century English novels that chronicle the coming-of-age of a young rogue with good connections. Harry Hubbard is a bright young man whose father and whose mentor, Hugh Montague (also known as Harlot), are both senior CIA figures and induct him into the Agency. Most of the book, after a melodramatic beginning, is one long flashback, Harry's autobiographical account of his early career--partly in his own words, partly in an exchange of letters with Harlot's beautiful, brilliant wife, Kittredge, whom Harry admires from afar and will one day steal. He is seen in training in the '50s under real-life figures like Allen Dulles and Dick Bissell, and with the martini-swigging, pistol-toting William Harvey at his first post in Berlin--where he meets Dix Butler, who becomes in a sense his nemesis. A quiet spell in Montevideo under Howard Hunt follows, then he goes to Washington, where he watches the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban missile crisis develop--and becomes the lover of President Kennedy's mistress. The book winds down with Kennedy's assassination and a sense of growing despair, only to conclude with a gnomic "To Be Continued." Whether or not there is really to be a sequel, Harlot's Ghost is entirely self-contained, and a bravura performance. In an author's note listing his voluminous sources and the relation of fictional to nonfictional characters, Mailer claims that good fiction "is more real, more nourishing to our sense of reality, than nonfiction." The book is an utterly convincing portrait of that strange, snobbish, macho, autocratic collection of brainy misfits who have played so large and often tragic a role in American history. BOMC main selection; first serial to Rolling Stone.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

To call Mailer's CIA novel a spy story would be like calling Moby Dick a whaling story. If you are seeking myriad details about how The Agency really operates, you will find them here, but Mailer has always sought the nuances that give facts their essential meaning, and that is what makes this book so much more than just another CIA expose. For Mailer's true purpose is to define that part of the American psyche that has spawned and sustains the CIA. It is a spirit (and note that this is a book more metaphysical than political) born of militant Christianity and buccaneering rapacity, of noblesse oblige and authoritarian devotion, a spirit believing itself turned in to God without worrying if it's heeding the devil. The dialectic here is Manicheanism more than Marxism, and--shades of Melville--the quest is one in which we may forfeit our souls. An immensely long but never laborious book, one where Mailer works compelling variations on his quintessential themes. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/90.
-Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Customer Reviews

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5.0 out of 5 stars POSSIBLE MOVIE MATERIAL April 3 2004

By Steven R. Travers

Format:Hardcover

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.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Some good stuff April 12 2002

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

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!

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