SOURCE: "Excess without End," in The New Leader, May 16, 1983, pp. 14-16.

In the following review, Davis offers a generally unfavorable assessment of Ancient Evenings. Though acknowledging the novel's "virtuosity and inventiveness," Davis finds shortcomings in Mailer's uninspired ideas and fascination with debauchery and violence.

This is a work of staggering ambition, far exceeding in inventiveness and scope anything Mailer has attempted before. Several reviewers have supported—and then backed away from—the publisher's claim that it is one of the major novels of the 20th century. On that level the obvious comparison is with Thomas Mann's vast tetralogy, Joseph and his Brothers. As efforts of the archaeological imagination trying to recreate the world of the Pharaohs they are strikingly similar; by standards of maturity of thought and humane social concern there is no comparison at all.

Thomas Mann's Joseph rose from the pit where his brothers cast him...