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Volume 30, Number 7 · April 28, 1983 Review
Norman in Egypt
By Harold Bloom Ancient Evenings by Norman Mailer Little, Brown, 704 pp., $19.95
'Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my state.' With this artful sentence, Norman Mailer begins his Book of the Dead. Our most conspicuous literary energy has generated its weirdest text, a book that defies usual aesthetic standards, even as it is beyond any conventional idea of good and evil. Like James Merrill, with whom he has in common absolutely nothing else, Mailer finds one of his occult points of origin in the visionary Yeats, but unlike Merrill, Mailer truly shares Yeats's obsession with the world of the dead. Merrill's spirits, in The Changing Light at Sandover, are representations of our lives, here and now. But Mailer has gone back to the ancient evenings of the Egyptians in order to find the religious meaning of death, sex, and reincarnation, using an outrageous literalism, not metaphor. What the subscribers to the Literary Guild will find in it is more than enough bumbuggery and humbuggery to give them their money's worth.