The American is the New Man, creating himself afresh; and for many a stateside writer, the novel has represented an opportunity to try on alternate identities. In his “Rabbit” books, John Updike, successful author, imagines himself as a failed jock, proud not of cerebral but of physical exploits. Likewise, in his would-be magnum opus, Harlot’s Ghost, Norman Mailer—wife-stabber, Pentagon stormer, and all-around anti-establishment Rebel Without a Clue—re-creates himself as a CIA man, thereby underscoring what we’ve known all along: that for Fanny Mailer’s ambitious son, the question “Which side are you on?” has never been nearly as important as “Are you where the action is?”¹

Harlot’s Ghost consists of two texts. In the first, the “Omega manuscript,” Mailer’s alter ego, Harry Hubbard, relates the circumstances under which he learned, in 1983, of the apparent death of Hugh “Harlot” Montague, his godfather and CIA mentor and the ex-husband of his wife and cousin, Kittredge (also a CIA agent). Widely regarded in the Company as a “burnt-out case,” Harry has an unadventurous job: he works on pro-CIA thrillers and serves as Harlot’s ghostwriter (which accounts for one of the title’s many meanings); he’s also supposed to be drafting a definitive study of the KGB, but has instead been compiling a secret memoir of his career. That memoir, the “Alpha manuscript,” which constitutes over nine-tenths of Harlot’s Ghost, begins in 1955, when Harry—the Yalie scion of an old New England clan (though his mother was a