of olden days. The Keep is eventually bought by Hugh Montague, whose C.I.A. code name is Harlot -- unusual, but then Hugh is altogether extraordinary -- where he lives with Kittredge and their young son, Christopher. Hugh has not only us an aria with carefully chosen dissonances?" Hugh gets grander and grander, but Harry's reactions may be grandest of all -- as when Hugh's use of the word "artist" for a counterspy elicits from his disciple The Reds, not us, are the evil ones, and so they are clever enough to imply that they are in the true tradition of Christ. . . . The Russians know how to merchandise one crucial commodity: Ideology. Our spiritual offering is

It is not easy to be sure that Mailer's much-headlined life doesn't color one's judgment, but the author of "Harlot's Ghost" does come across as a punch-drunk writer trying to outbox all competition, real or imaginary. Who that, in a particularly harrowing scene, Dix tries, unsuccessfully but deeply affectingly, to rape or seduce the still virginal young man.Mailer's C.I.A., it must be noted, is very strong in the humanities. The talk here is full of erudite references to Alexander Calder, Henry Miller, Henry James, Hemingway, Melville, Kant, Lautreamont, Joyce, Kierkegaard, the Oxford English Dictionary, most of this up, then bend it to fit in with his fictional characters -- who tend to pale by comparison -- only to end up with an arbitrary, lopsided, lumpy novel that outstays its welcome. And keeps on outstaying it. This information can affect you in two ways. You may feel that this epic novel, which means among other things to explain United States foreign policy over the last few decades from the point of view of the Central Intelligence Agency (or, more specifically,

One has become used to this stolid, complacent return serve: so apparently grounded in reason and scepticism but so often naive and one-dimensional. In one way, the so-called ‘conspiracy theory’ need be no more than the mind’s needful search for an explanation, or for an alternative to credulity. If one exempts things like anti-semitism or fear of Freemasons, which belong more properly to the world of post-Salem paranoia and have been ably dealt with by Professor Richard Hofstadter in his study The Paranoid Style in American Politics, then modern American conspiracy theory begins with the Warren Commission. There had been toxic political speculation at high level before, as when certain people thought that there was something too convenient about the Lusitania for President Woodrow Wilson, and too easy about Pearl Harbour for President Franklin Roosevelt – both of these, incidentally, hypotheses which later Churchill historians are finding harder to dismiss – but such arguments had been subsumed in the long withdrawing roar of American isolationism. The events in Dealey Plaza and the Dallas Police Department in November 1963 were at once impressed on every American. And the Warren Commission of Inquiry came up with an explanation which, it is pretty safe to say, nobody really believes. Conspiracy theory thus becomes an ailment of democracy. It is the white noise which moves in to fill the vacuity of the official version. To blame the theorists is therefore to look at only half the story, and sometimes even less. Always look to the language. We’ve built a foundation for ourselves almost as good as a directive. “Subvert military leaders to the point where they will be ready to overthrow Castro”. Well, son, tell me. How do you do that by half?... Always look to the language.’ The three central characters, all inventions, interact intimately with major and minor historical figures in a device hallowed by much illustrious fiction, but especially in vogue since E. L. Doctorow's "Ragtime," in whose movie version, in the alley between two theaters -- those separate playhouses of paranoia and cynicism. . . . Are [ we ] trying to analyze no more than an error by our opponents, a bureaucratic fumble, a gaffe, or, to the contrary, do we have beforeKittredge. She could have been a horse who had just seen another horse trot by with a dead man in the saddle." Does a horse care? They shoot people, don't they?