[Ancient Evenings] is hands down the most surprising work Mailer has ever offered. It really is set entirely in an alien long ago, just as the author had been promising during the decade he took to write it. Yet no amount of advance speculation proves adequate to the thing itself: an artifact of evident craftsmanship and utterly invisible significance.

A lengthy journey begins with the agonies of death ("Volcanic lips give fire, wells bubble. Bone lies like rubble upon the wound"). Surviving this fiery purgation is the ka (diminished soul) of an Egyptian named Menenhetet II. After experiencing the mummification of his discarded body, this ghost meets the kindred spirit of his great-grandfather Menenhetet I….

The book is already some 230 pages old when Menenhetet I eases into this narration, and none of the characters seems in any hurry to pick up the pace. Worse, Mailer shuns the devices...