Norman Mailer has spent a lifetime looking for attention. At some point he must have decided that if he couldn’t get enough of it through his literary efforts, then he might succeed with exhibitionistic behavior. Hence the famous belligerence, the hubris, and the enfant terrible shenanigans, the efforts to shock and offend. But as the twentieth century draws to a close and fiction, like life, gets ever more bizarre, it is becoming almost impossible to shock or offend anymore. How, then, might an aging, slightly out-of-date novelist find his way back into the spotlight?

He must have been sure that by writing a novel about Jesus, and in the first person, he could raise a few hackles. In an interview with The New York Times shortly after publication of his new novel, The Gospel According to the Son,[1] Mailer said hopefully, “There’s an irritation factor I’m presuming. The ‘How dare he!’ It’s very much present in literary people.”

Dream on. Nikos Kazantzakis, with The Last Temptation of Christ (and Martin Scorsese with his film version of that novel), got there first, and did indeed cause a certain amount of scandal, especially in the Catholic Church. By now, though, the idea of presenting Jesus as a fallible, even a sexual, human being is a little old hat, and Mailer’s book will probably induce not outrage so much as mild amusement that the old man is up to his antics again. In publicizing his novel the author has injected just the right tone of familiar Maileresque swagger: the New Testament, he says, is full of “pretty dull prose and a contradictory, almost hopeless way of telling the story. So I thought this account, this wonderful narrative, ought to be properly told… . If I can write about Isis and Osiris and Ra, then certainly the New Testament is not going to be that difficult to do.”

Now I may be wrong, but I think it is safe to predict that the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John will continue to be read for a good long time after the Gospel of Norman has been forgotten. Whether or not the story of Christ is, as Mailer insists, the Greatest Story Ever Told, it is certain that the New Testament contains some of the greatest prose ever written, and equally certain that the greatness of the prose has been instrumental in conserving the power and mystery of Christianity and converting many millions of souls over the centuries. “Jesus comes alive as a God with the great lines,” Mailer admits, “but as a man he doesn’t come alive at all.” The truth is, though, that the aura of mystery around Jesus, the very fact that he is contradictory, inexplicable, and remote is perhaps the most potent aspect of the New Testament. It is because of the mystery that millions—including many non-believers— continue to be drawn to the Gospels.

If it was Mailer’s intent to do away with the mystery, he has certainly succeeded. In his version of Christ’s inner life he portrays the Messiah as a dopey, inarticulate guy who is not too sure why God has chosen him in the first place. The real problem is not that Mailer dares too much but that he has not been bold or daring enough in reimagining Jesus, in putting words into his mouth or thoughts into his head. When John the Baptist is imprisoned by Herod Antipas, for instance, Jesus simply says, “So I knew that my time had come. I must leave Nazareth. I must take up a life of preaching and try to emulate what John had done.” Mailer’s Jesus seldom lets us any deeper into his thoughts—if, indeed, his thoughts go any deeper—than this. Later, speaking of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells us that the evangelists got it all wrong: “They had me saying all manner of things, and some were the opposite of others.” An intriguing thought: what, if not what we have in the New Testament, did he really say? But Mailer doesn’t dare rise to his own challenge: in his version of the Sermon, all of Jesus’ words come straight from Matthew, the “great lines” hopelessly overpowering Mailer’s feeble prose.

Mailer’s Jesus begins his story by explaining why he has chosen to write his own Gospel, straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were. “While I would not say that Mark’s gospel is false, it has much exaggeration. And I would offer less for Matthew, and for Luke and John, who gave me words I never uttered and described me as gentle when I was pale with rage.” It is perfectly true, of course, that the evangelists were following their own agenda, which was to gain new adherents to the Christian faith; where that agenda diverged from historical memory they had no compunction about altering the events. Extensive research on the historical Jesus has revealed countless fascinating alternatives to the “facts” of his life that have accrued over two millenia.

If Mailer had been willing to invest any significant time, imagination, or effort, he might have written a genuinely interesting —and genuinely provocative—novel, exploiting such possibilities. Instead, he has chosen to give us a mishmash of the four Gospels, with few surprises and very few radical departures from orthodoxy, except for predictable stuff like Jesus’ loins quickening as he suffers the ravages of lust, or some such Lawrentian gobbledygook. Mailer’s Jesus is born in Bethlehem, in a manger. An angel attends his birth and proclaims him the son of God. Joseph is a carpenter, and Jesus is brought up to that profession. After Joseph’s death Jesus, at the age of thirty, begins his career as a holy man. He performs miracles, walks on water, and is spoken to by God. He is tempted three times by Satan. He holds a Last Supper on the Passover, and invents the Eucharist. He is betrayed by Judas, condemned by the Jews of the Temple, crucified, and resurrected. He is now in Heaven, where he sits at the right hand of God.

Not much here, in fact, to shock the pious. Though he is himself a Jew, Mailer appears to accept the evangelists’ assertion —now generally agreed to have been a device to deflect Roman retaliation—that it was the Jews, and not the Romans, who insisted that Jesus be put to death. Mailer has chosen, in fact, to perpetuate a pernicious myth that has caused the Jews two millenia of persecution at Christian hands. Mailer’s only radical departure from Christian tradition—possibly the book’s only valid raison d’être—is not in his interpretation of Christ, but of God. Mailer’s God is fallible, the death of his Son a defeat rather than, as it is interpreted by Christian theology, a victory. But even God, as imagined by Mailer, is faintly comical, rather like a hardworking dad reaching for the martini shaker after a tough day at the office. “I remain on the right hand of God,” Jesus says. “My father, however, does not often speak to me. Nonetheless, I honor Him. Surely He sends forth as much love as He can offer, but His love is not without limit.”

Mailer strives for seriousness, but the book is always funny, sometimes hilariously so, because of its language. Like a little child who prays to God with the words “thee” and “thou” because he thinks that’s the way God talks, Mailer has chosen a phony Jacobean patter through which disconcerting echoes of New Yorkese can be heard. Of course, there is no earthly reason why Jesus and his fellows should speak in seventeenth-century English: if they are not going to speak Aramaic, which was the historical Jesus’ native language, then they might just as well speak twentieth-century American, a dialect with which Mailer has shown considerable skill. Instead he has opted for a lingo that sounds like it’s out of a third-rate Biblical epic, presumably because he didn’t feel up to the challenge of modernizing, and probably losing the impact, of the “great lines” on which the tale depends, lines like: “Get thee behind me, Satan”; “I came not to send peace, but a sword”; or “I am the resurrection, and the life.” Mailer’s literary inferiority to Christ, the evangelists, and the translators of the King James Bible can be judged by almost any passage in The Gospel According to the Son. A couple of representative ones:  

I can also say that this conversation with Judas was wondrous for clearing disarray. At last all seemed to be in order. We were ready. I could hardly believe we were ready to set out at last for Jerusalem, but it was a good morning. If none of us were [sic] without fear, we were touched by happiness as well. For we had not been enslaved by our fear. Our legs knew their own joy.

While we waited and worked to keep our spirits together, I had my times of doubt. I had labored in so many ways to reach the hearts of my fellow Jews, good men, even pillars of the community, but so many had wanted nothing to do with me.

Pillars of the community yet! Perhaps they are members of the Elks Club, too! Mailer’s discomfort with the idiolect he has chosen for his hero is evident as, over and over, he slips in such Americanisms and anachronisms. My own favorite: “Yet these Pharisees were proud; from the heights of their self-esteem they offered homage to themselves.”

If one didn’t know better, one might think that Mailer’s Jesus spent his time reading pop psychology paperbacks or relaxing in front of daytime TV. The Gospel According to the Son is full of topical Nineties concerns. Jesus suffers, for example, from repressed memory syndrome: though Joseph told him of his holy mission when he was a child, he says, “what I learned was so far from the understanding of a boy that soon after our return, I fell into a long fever. All that Joseph told me seemed lost. Still, I do not think it was the fever that made me forget, but rather that I did not wish to remember.” When Jesus raises the daughter of Jairus, he senses that she is the victim of a dysfunctional family life: it was “a house of many unclean feelings. No air was sweet in these rooms, and those stale miseries that feed upon themselves were with us.”

This Jesus is gay-friendly. Though Peter criticizes the effeminate ways of certain men at Capernaum, Jesus argues that “they were tender in spirit, and would congregate beneath a tree, because they were not welcome in the temple. I was gentle with them.” Indeed, his relationship with Judas is represented as being full of suppressed sexual tension. “With his dark beard, he was handsome. I wished him to be among my twelve even if I could not see what was in my heart. His eyes were too full of fire. Indeed, I felt blinded by the blaze of his spirit.” And when Judas gives the kiss of betrayal, Jesus relates, “he kissed me on the mouth. It was then that I knew he loved me too, and more than he could ever have believed.”

Even feminist concerns are aired, though —perhaps predictably, seeing that this comes from Mailer—they are aired by the Devil. “Your Father,” he tells Jesus, “does not comprehend that women are creatures different from men and live with separate understanding. Indeed, your Father has no inkling of women; His scorn for them is shared by His prophets, who speak, so they claim, with His voice.” Jesus, on the other hand, seems to think that women should not trouble their pretty heads over the effort of bringing about the Kingdom of God. “I had not sought to save the world through the efforts of women,” he says. “Only through the strivings of men.”

In the May issue of Playboy, a journalist interviewing Saul Bellow quoted Mailer as having said, almost forty years ago, that his ambition was “to write a novel which Dostoyevsky and Marx, Joyce and Freud, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Proust and Spengler, Faulkner, and even old moldering Hemingway might come to read, for it would carry what they had to tell another part of the way,” to which Bellow smartly retorted, “He deserved to fail with a fantasy like that. He wasn’t thinking about writing a marvelous book, he was thinking of placing himself in a tradition.” The Gospel According to the Son shows that Mailer still is more concerned with his place in a tradition than with the actual quality of his work; for all its highflown ideas it is a flimsy, careless, shoddy piece of writing, and a cynical effort to create excitement by addressing a subject about which many people feel passionately. That he himself does not feel passionately is evident from the clear lack of effort he has put into his work.

Notes
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The Gospel According to the Son, by Norman Mailer; Random House, 242 pages, $22. Go back to the text.