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“Norman Mailer: The Trouble With Harry”

A very long (and funny, even where I didn’t get the references) send-up of Norman Mailer’s novel Harlot’s Ghost (1991). “Harry” is Harry Hubbard, the protagonist in Mailer’s novel. This essay is ostensibly a review of the new novel but just as much  Leonard’s review of Mailer of a writer in general. Not a coincidence, I’m sure, that this longest of the essays is about a very long novel and Leonard sums it up by writing, “A 1,310 page novel about the CIA leaves out Viet Nam, Water Gate, Nicaragua and Iranamok, not to mention running drugs, laundering money and fingering Mandela.” Not a big fan of this, evidently, mess off a big book Leonard writes of Mailer’s style as full of “…metaphors so meaning moistened that they stick to our thumbs…”

Great example of Mailer’s writing that Leonard quotes “Blobs are always looking to articulate themselves as into a higher form of blob.” Well, at least I won't have to add this one to my Goodreads.com list.

Even the book cover is a cliche:

New word: intellections = big word for thoughts (evidently used by Mailer in the book)…would be cool if it meant “thoughts about elections” or “elections for university presidents.” Woodrow Wilson was the first President intellected?

New learning: According to The Center for Research and Globalization, “Nelson Mandela’s arrest in 1962, which led to 18 of his 27 years of imprisonment on Robbins Island, was based on the work of the CIA…The ANC was labeled and treated as a terrorist organization and pro-communist by the CIA and successive U.S. administrations, Democratic and Republican alike.”