The Gospel according to the Son Mailer's attempt to reimagine the Gospel is not nearly as awful as his critics would have you believe But neither is it very illuminating by Norman Mailer
Miles, Jack
Velcro man meets Teflon story The Gospel according to the Son Norman Mailer Random House, $22,242 pp. Jack Miles What is the opposite of a Tef-Ion personality? A Velcro personality? Whatever...
...Mailer retains even the phrase, "His blood be upon us and upon our chil-dren...
...Ferrucci makes a particularly instruc-tive contrast, for his retelling of the gos-pel (which constitutes, for him, only a chapter in God's long life) is full of pi-caresque, sometimes grotesque inven-tion...
...Such is the experience of reading The Gospel according to the Son...
...To do otherwise would be to risk unintentional comedy...
...Many of the words of Jesus are quoted verbatim from the Gospel texts...
...Mailer makes things partic-ularly difficult for himself by requiring Jesus not just to utter some new utter-ances but to play the role of evangelist and tell the whole story...
...The taste reminds one of apple...
...Whence then the foaming outrage on the part of so many reviewers...
...Played in earnest, this "further words of" game is almost impossible to win if only be-cause success, when it does come, comes by the total suppression of an author's own voice...
...And I began to lie a long time ago...
...Its surface calm exceeds that of The Executioner's Song, itself a stylistic ex-ception to the clamorous Mailer rule...
...I know very well that neither hells nor paradises exist, but this even-ing at supper I will give a special speech about the final judgment, which will never take place, and they will believe me...
...There is something undeniably impressive about the restraint of this style...
...As late as the 1952 Revised Standard Version, much of the archaic Jacobean vigor was retained...
...He didn't do it...
...There is even the occasional morsel of actual apple...
...Given the absence of sensationalism in the narration, most reviewers have hung their indignation on the fact that Mailer makes his diatessaron a Jesus-pseudepigraph...
...Even when he has committed no outrage, outrage somehow adheres to him...
...As a literary device, this may or may not work, but if it is an affront to good taste, it is scarcely an unprecedented affront...
...Porca miseria...
...I do not mean to say that more in-vention in the Ferrucci vein would have made for a better book...
...Once Mailer chose to write in the person of Jesus, he had to write in lan-guage that would not depart entirely from what his readers remember of the lan-guage of Jesus...
...The miracles are still miracles...
...The voice of Jesus as one might hear it in a contemporary translation of the Gospels from the orig-inal Greek is missing...
...It is at such moments that one sees reputation some-how taking on a life of its own, becom-ing a hypostasis, almost an incarnation, toward which anger or devotion may be directed irrespective of what the his-torical personage is actually about down here on Earth...
...The 1991 NRSV sacrifices that vigor without gaining the very different kind of energy that only a fresh translation from the original Hebrew and Greek can release...
...As it is, Mailer has offered a quiet, sweet, almost wan little book, a kindly offering from a New York Jew to his wife's Bible Belt family...
...I could very well avoid it, but I have no choice if I want to save at least a part of what I have preached...
...If in this im-potent, denatured language he had cho-sen to offer some shocking or otherwise arresting revision of the received story, the effect of the contrast might still have been strong, though it is perhaps late in the day for that sort of thing...
...the writer does not dominate the mate-rial...
...As Son explains to Father, shortly before the Last Supper, in a voice "hoarse with wine and dejection," I will have to get them to crucify me so as to be remembered...
...It won't loom large either in the Mailer canon or on the list of artworks inspired by the life of Christ, but it is an honest effort that deserves much better than it has re-ceived...
...What goes for the contents of The Gospel according to the Son goes also for the style, though I find the style far and away the most memorable feature of the book...
...On the last page of this Bible story, we are still wait-ing for the Mailer of uproarious legend to show up, the Mailer who might have written-but hasn't-The Gospel accord-ing to Judas...
...It might more fully be described as the plain speech of William Tyndale with the more noticeable archaisms edit-ed out...
...Whatever it is, Norman Mailer seems to have it...
...Jack Miles What is the opposite of a Tef-Ion personality...
...What else can I do...
...The Gospel according to the Son is, as to its content, a mild, almost deferential Bible story in which Jesus has no vices of any kind and, notably, no sex life whatsoever beyond a vaguely turbulent dream or two in boyhood...
...Thus, he makes the words "Let this cup pass from me" refer literally to the cup with which a deranged Jesus is drinking himself into oblivion...
...What style can possibly work for that...
...The risks, the purely literary risks, in writing with imaginative elaboration or revision a story that your readers already know so well, are large unless all you are aiming at is comedy in the Monty Python (The Life of Brian) or Gore Vidal (Live from Gol-gotha) manner...
...Searching for a comparison to Mailer's diction-by-subtraction, I found myself thinking of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, the 1991 update of an earlier update of the King James Version...
...The NRSV is in the main a re-vision by subtraction...
...that is, a first-person account in the feigned voice of Jesus...
...What distinguishes The Gospel ac-cording to the Son, Mailer's new retelling of the gospel story, is not its offensive-ness but, as Reynolds Price gently point-ed out in the New York Times Book Review, its lack of invention...
...The Virgin Birth is still a virgin birth...
...But the experience overall is an experience of frustration...
...Parody is always funnier if you know the original...
...Though this book is being sold as a novel, it differs only somewhat from a diatessaron, a harmony of the four canonical Gospels...
...The whole text has to come out of his mouth...
...The point can scarce-ly be overstressed...
...None greeted the publication, some months ago, of another first-per-son narration in a feigned divine voice, Franco Ferrucci's The Life of God (as Told by Himself) (Chicago...
...No outrage, I note, has greeted the use of essentially the same device by Neale Donald Walsch in the mawkish Conver-sations with God (Putnam), which was rid-ing high on the best-seller list well before The Gospel according to the Son arrived and still is...
...Mailer's real voice is missing...
...What comes through instead, beating like a drum so loud it drowns out the orchestra, is the familiar gospel story itself...
...In short, one cannot achieve an ef-fective idiom either for the Bible or for a Bible-retelling by beginning in King James English and then doubling back to remove the more noticeable archaisms...
...But they reacted as if he had done it...
...Even the vigor of faux-Jacobean is missing...
...By the same token, there is little to engage anyone who owns a Bible...
...Price has been more the exception than the rule...
...In short, there is lit-tle to disturb a conservative Christian here...
...The style he comes up with has been approvingly characterized by no less a critic than Frank Kermode as "sermo hu-milis...
...There are no conspirato-rial scandals in the passion and death...
...Unfortunately, if you are not writing comedy, there are risks in fail-ing to invent as well as in inventing...
...What is pres-ent is only Mailer's almost eerie ability to manage all these subtractions and still have something left...
...Their kind of comic tar-get is easy to hit precisely because their readers already know the story so well...
...That "material," to speak as novelists speak, dominates this writer...
...But how strange it is to be struck more by what a writer has escaped than by what he has achieved...
...The Resurrection itself comes off right on schedule...
...is this not just the sort of wretched excess that the literati were predisposed to expect from Mailer...
...Groans have been groaned over the quasi-biblical diction Mailer devis-es for his Jesus-narrator, but consider the problem to which that diction is the so-lution...
...The effect for the reader, if one does that, is the effect of eating apple peels...
...They didn't get it...
...In despair over his deluded son, God wanders the streets, gets drunk himself, and "end[s] up in bed with a girl, on whose breast I caught myself crying out the name of Mary Magdalene, before submerging again in sleep...
Vol. 124 • July 1997 • No. 13
