Harlot's Ghost

Product Information

When I read something that's longer than The Stand, War and Peace, and the Bible, an ending doesn't seem like too much to ask for. If there is one complaint, the beginning of the ending (which is actually the beginning of the book) is less than stellar.

At first it appears to be the autobiography of Harry Hubbard, which is made up of anecdotes of his life and actions with the CIA, covert operations in Uruguay, the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, the Bay of Pigs Invasion, the Mafia in the 60s and the assassination of JFK.I even like slate-brown rivers that rush through canyons in the West, but I love the piercing blue of Frenchman’s Bay and Blue Hill Bay, and the bottomless blue of the Eastern and Western Way surrounding Mount Desert—indeed, one’s affection for the island even shares the local accent. The book is clearly written by someone is aware of and has come to terms with many of his own shortcomings and conceits.

This book is no exception and to me it feels like a spiritual, though clearly not an actual, autobiography. The public self, the secret self and the inner conflicts that cloud an agent's ethics and takes over his soul are well-developed in Kittredge, as well as in the characters of Harlot and Harry. Yet Mailer is less interested in the nuts and bolts of espionage, although there’s an ample amount of that, than how the labyrinth of intelligence-gathering warps its operatives.For all its tourist traffic come July, Mount Desert is still possessed of a tender yet monumental silence.

When he talks about his training at the Farm, he is unable to describe a class in lock-picking without comparing it to the physical act of love. is "a sacrament," Harry cheats on her with Chloe, a waitress, with whom it is "like kids in the barn. Mailer, in his afterword, pats himself on the back about how accurate his novel is, about how much inside dish he unearthed, and how his fiction is closer to the truth than anyone dares. The buggering portion seemed reminiscent of Ancient Evenings, which was a book I read back in the 80's.without moving the reader into the posture of assuming that he is offering a historical account disguised as fiction, and that he explicitly did not want to do. From high school on, Chloe had doubtless been making love with her mouth to both ends of her friends.

There can no longer be any doubt that he possesses the largest mind and imagination at work in American literature today. colleague Cal Hubbard's son, how to climb rocks; he has also watched over Harry's career at the Agency.Between missions, Hubbard struggles with his strained marriage to a well-connected WASP, an affair with a gangster’s moll who’s also sleeping with John F.