[Ancient Evenings is] the strangest of Norman Mailer's books, and its oddity does not in any important way have to do either with its Egyptian setting or with the exotic career—exotic even by ancient Egyptian standards—of Menenhetet, its protagonist-narrator whose four lives, including three reincarnations, span 180 years (1290 to 1100 BC) of the nineteenth and twentieth dynasties (1320 to 1121 BC). What is remarkable here is the degree to which Mailer has naturalized himself as an ancient Egyptian, so that he writes as if saturated with the mentality and the governing assumptions, some of which he revises rather freely, of a culture in which the idea of the human is markedly different from what it has been in the West for the last 1,500 years or so. Mailer has never before tried anything so perilous, and the prodigious demands he makes on the reader are a clue to his ambitions. This is at once his most accomplished and his most problematic work.
Of the twenty-three books Mailer has written so far, only Ancient Evenings achieves the magnitude which can give a retrospective order and enhancement to everything else. Up to now it has been possible to think of him as perhaps a great writer, but one who had yet to write his major book. Many commentators have mistakenly credited him here, and in his last novel The Executioner's Song, with a new degree of self-effacement. Looking back from the new book one can see even more clearly than before that the central condition of nearly all his writing depends not on some prior sense of self, the famous Mailer ego, but rather on self-fragmentation and dispersal. Even when, as is so often the case, Mailer is his own subject, he cannot be said to exist simply in the narrative that tells his story, but is to be found instead within a larger, expressive structure of which his voice is only one part looking for other parts. Just as it radically reduces his literary, let alone his personal identity, to assume that the voice in Armies of the Night refers us directly to the "real" Mailer, so it is equally mistaken to assume that because that voice is absent from Ancient Evenings he has thereby and suddenly become invisible.
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