The Gospel According to the Son is a 1999 novel by Norman Mailer.
April 24, 1997
Yes, His New Book Is Biblical, but Don't Call Him God
By BRUCE WEBER
There is an old joke Norman Mailer is particularly fond of about a man who is complaining to God. The man whines: ''You're not treating me fairly, God. Why not? Why don't you treat me fairly?''
''And the thunder comes down from heaven,'' Mr. Mailer said, anticipating the punch line with a boyish grin. ''And God says, 'Because you bug me.' ''
Mr. Mailer told the joke this week to help explain his own religious beliefs -- and the God in his new book, ''The Gospel According to the Son.''
''I've always been religious,'' he said. ''I just have a God that's a little different from others. It's not because I'm special. It's just that it's the only thing that makes sense for me: the notion I have of an imperfect God doing the best that He or She can do. I've found it immensely useful as a religion, because self-pity used to be one of my vices.''
Hence the joke.
This is a powerful God indeed if He (or She) is responsible for transforming Mr. Mailer from a self-pitying sort. Now 74, he is, of course, among the most ambitious, hubristic, audacious writers (and New Yorkers) of the past half century.
In his journalistic and novelistic narratives, he has presumed to enter the minds of contemporary killers and ancient Egyptians, not to mention Muhammad Ali, Marilyn Monroe, Lee Harvey Oswald and Pablo Picasso, among others. At the same time, he has led a public life of a celebrity-like nature, an odd type of self-aggrandizement for a serious writer. He has had six wives and has eight children. Among his famous forays into the headlines: a stabbing attack of his second wife, Adele, in 1960; an unsuccessful run for Mayor of New York in 1969; his involvement, in 1982, with Jack Henry Abbott, a writer whose release from prison he helped secure and who subsequently killed a waiter in the East Village.
So should anybody be surprised at his latest venture, in which he purports to retell what the writer Fulton Oursler called ''The Greatest Story Ever Told''? That is the story of Jesus Christ, of course, which Mr. Mailer has set about narrating by the Son of God himself. Finally, the true story of the virgin birth, loaves and fishes, walking on water, the raising of Lazarus, the resurrection, not to mention a coming of age story in which a young man comes to understand his demanding Dad.
All this, from a Brooklyn Jew, may be the very embodiment of chutzpah, which Mr. Mailer acknowledges as a ''vulgar and endearing'' quality that is ''very much a part of New York.'' And though he is rounder, more like a snowman than he was in his more physically pugnacious days, Mr. Mailer maintains his clear-eyed combative quality, his ease with self-defense.
''What people don't understand is the power of a novelist,'' he said. ''It doesn't surprise them at all if a surgeon can pull off a marvelous cure, if he cuts into a place in the heart that's never been cut before. They think if a guy's been a professional for 30 or 40 years, he should be good. Well, I've been a novelist for 50 years. I should be good. I should be able to try things that other people can't try.
''What people think is the largest dare of all I think was the only sensible thing to do, and that was writing in the first person. The negative side was obvious. 'How dare Norman Mailer! Vanity is vanity, hubris is hubris, but this is passing the point of no return,' and so forth and so on. So let me just assure the New York world -- the rest of America will never believe me -- that I do not think of myself as Jesus Christ.''
The new book, he said, was in part a celebration of Jesus Christ as a radical with a conscience. ''Not as radical as Judas,'' said Mr. Mailer, who portrays Judas Iscariot as an unforgiving zealot who betrays Jesus for having a wavering, very human faith. ''But radical enough for me.''
Sitting in the Brooklyn Heights apartment where he has lived since 1961, he lamented the demise of his view across the East River to lower Manhattan.
''It's gotten awful,'' he said. Once, he recalled, it was an urbanscape slowly ascending from the Battery shore north to a nest of spired skyscrapers, ''like foothills rising into mountains.'' He waved a dismissive hand. ''Now it's all these flattops.''
His scorn for the profile of the financial district was not irrelevant to his new book; his Jesus is fiercely disturbed by greed, by the elevation of worldly goods above spiritual concerns.
''Jesus saw the horror of money,'' Mr. Mailer said. ''As I was reading the New Testament, I realized in a funny way that the message that Jesus had, the animosity he felt toward money, the sense that Mammon was scourging the world, is so applicable today. It's significant that at the end of the cold war, a huge greed, a huge passion to destroy the safety net in America came into being. There's something terribly ugly in capitalism, and what's happened now in America is all our values are being leached out by the immense appetite for money.''
''The Gospel According to the Son'' is Mr. Mailer's 30th book, and by his standards, it is, at 242 pages, brief. Un-Maileresque, as well, is its language and tone, which is largely without the rambling, muscular sentences and grandiosity of personal pronouncement that have pleased or outraged his readers over the years. Instead, the voice of the book is muted, almost quiet, consciously suggesting the formally archaic sound of the King James Bible, the voice of a man struggling with his power and his conscience for the proper measure of humility.
''Each day I came to understand a little more of why the Lord has chosen me,'' Mr. Mailer wrote. ''I could see how my Father's patience would be tried with His creation. We consumed His charity and kept repeating our sins.''
In other words, Mr. Mailer's Christ sounds more like traditional Christ than traditional Mailer.
Church officials have not weighed in on the book as yet -- ''We don't have a comment at this time,'' said the Rev. Paul Keenan, a spokesman for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York -- though reviewers have. Publishers Weekly lauded the book as ''some sort of literary miracle,'' but in spite of Mr. Mailer's concessions to the style and point of view of the Son of God, many other critics were not persuaded to forgive the author his trespasses.
''It seems trite to dump on Mailer for having such a manifestly batty idea as retelling the story of Jesus with the son as first-person narrator,'' David Gates wrote in Newsweek. ''When Mailer's gone wrong before, it's either by overreaching or plotting. In this book he does both.''
Mr. Mailer actually wanted the book published anonymously, but with an announcement that the author's identity would be revealed three months after publication, so that it could be reviewed without his baggage. Mr. Mailer said the plan was rejected by Random House, however, after the storm caused by a previous Anonymous, Joe Klein, who had lied to keep his authorship of the Random House book, ''Primary Colors,'' secret. (Jason Epstein, Mr. Mailer's editor, said that was not the reason. ''It just didn't make any sense to me,'' Mr. Epstein said of keeping Mr. Mailer anonymous.)
''The book will get a fair share of bad reviews,'' Mr. Mailer said, ''but that I take for granted. I call a fair share between 65 percent and 75 percent bad reviews.''
He added: ''There's an irritation factor I'm presuming. The 'How dare he!' It's very much present in literary people.''
In spite of his seasoned shrug, Mr. Mailer said he was angry at The New York Times, not so much for publishing a negative review, by Michiko Kakutani, but for doing so weeks before the official publication date. Such a treatment of his work, he said, unfairly sets the tone for reviews to come, and he was doubly upset because he has made this complaint to The Times before.
John Darnton, The Times's culture editor, said that although the review was published early, the book was already in bookstores, and that Random House, which was already advertising the book, had called The Times to acknowledge that the book was ahead of schedule.
Mr. Mailer said one reason he wrote the book was that after re-reading the New Testament, he was struck by how insufficient it was as literature.
''I found Jesus in the New Testament to be not available,'' he said, ''not present as a human being very much. The lines in the New Testament are exceptional, the great lines, and Jesus comes alive as a God with the great lines, but as a man he doesn't come alive at all.''
''The narrative has become the spiritual or psychological keel of Western civilization,'' he continued, ''and no one really knows it because no one goes near the story. It is the greatest story ever told, and I thought there are easily 100 novelists in the world who could have done a better job, and I'm one of them, so I thought, I'm going to do this.''
(Actually, asked a bit later to rate himself, Mr. Mailer said he was one of the top five novelists in America, naming as the others Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, John Updike and one other person whom he would not name ''so that all manner of men and women don't get angry.'')
This kind of talk raises a number of questions, among which would be this: After the greatest story ever told, what is there to do for an encore?
Mr. Mailer laughed. He could not say, really.
''Talking about what you're going to do, in my case, has proved a very bad idea,'' he said. ''Years ago I promised to hit the longest ball in the history of American letters, and on and on.'' Nonetheless, he does know what his next book is.
Next year, 50 years after the publication of his first novel, ''The Naked and the Dead,'' Mr. Mailer will turn 75. ''Those are two nice numbers,'' he said. ''They commemorate each other somehow.''
Random House will commemorate them by publishing a Mailer retrospective volume, maybe 1,500 pages of Mr. Mailer's own selections of his best writing, ''provided he delivers it on time,'' Mr. Epstein said.
Perfect. What could be more appropriate after a fresh look at God's work than a fresh look at his own?
Photo: Norman Mailer says Christ never comes alive as a person in the New Testament. He tried to remedy that in his new book. (Edward Keating/The New York Times) Chart/Photo: ''First Person Singular'' From ''The Gospel According to the Son,'' by Norman Mailer (Random House, 1997): In my dream on this night, I heard one angel say: ''For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. Whoever believes in Him shall have everlasting life. For God did not send His son to condemn the world but to save it.'' How I hoped that the angel spoke truth! For then I would be like a light sent into the world. Yet men seemed to love darkness more than light. I awoke, then, in confusion. For I did not know whether I was here to save the world or to be condemned by the world. Each night I heard a command in my sleep, but the voice was my own; it was there to tell me that I must leave these lands where people waited to touch my garment an go instead among the proud of Jerusalem: I must enter the halls of the Great Temple, even if my days would then be numbered by the fingers on one hand. (pg. B1)
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/04/24/nyregion/yes-his-new-book-is-biblical-but-don-t-call-him-god.html?sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2
The Gospel According to the Son
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
In the two millennia since Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote their separate biographies of Jesus, only a handful of other authors have attempted renditions--Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and D. H. Lawrence have tried their hands at it; scholars E. P. Sanders and Raymond Brown have produced academic treatises on the historical Jesus. Perhaps the best-known fictional account of the life of Jesus is Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ, which explores the Son of Man's all-too-human side. Norman Mailer joins these ranks with The Gospel According to the Son.
Not content to chronicle Jesus' life in the form of an apocryphal gospel, Mailer has the chutzpah to crawl inside his title character's head and tell the story from the first-person point of view. Here we get the Prince of Peace's personal account of his temptation by Satan, his three-year ministry, and his agony on the cross. Mailer presents an entirely new kind of passion play, one that remains faithful to the shape of Jesus' life as outlined in the gospels, while daring to imagine the inner life of this most elusive historical figure. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
This novel is exactly what it sounds like: the gospel story retold from Christ's point of view. Although Mailer treats his New Testament sources with respect, Jesus turns out to be just the sort of character one would expect to find in a Norman Mailer novel. He is embarrassed by his Jewish mother and complains that God the Father barely speaks to him. He questions his success in healing the sick and struggles with his growing celebrity. Worse, he waffles on crucial issues like voluntary poverty, alienating Judas and other hardcore revolutionaries. Of particular interest is the central role Mailer assigns to Satan. Jesus believes that God and Satan are equally matched and that neither one will ever get the upper hand. In short, Mailer has concocted a profoundly heretical "gnostic" gospel. The problem is that few readers will have much interest in Mailer's theology, and, taken simply as a novel, the book leaves much to be desired. Recommended mainly for comprehensive collections of Mailer's work.
-?Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch., Los Angeles
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
http://www.amazon.com/Gospel-According-Son-Novel/dp/0345434080
Mailer, the Great I Am
Norman Mailer's latest work is a life of Christ - told in the first person. If the reaction he hopes for is outrage, he's right. But if he thinks he's original, he's much mistaken. By Boyd Tonkin
In the days before New York taxis were piloted by Russians or Koreans, a critic waggishly remarked that Norman Mailer wrote the sort of books that cab drivers would write - if they could write. He had a point. It was 49 years ago that the Brooklyn bruiser (now 73) launched a career full of affronts and outrages with his wartime epic The Naked and the Dead. Since then, his fiction and non-fiction has punched its way from Hollywood to the CIA the Apollo moonshots to Lee Harvey Oswald. Even Picasso (the subject of a recent prurient slice of biography) has more than his fair share of cabbie appeal.
Now, thanks to a brief note in the spring catalogue from Random House, New York, we know that Mailer has picked the toughest bout of the lot. The forthcoming Gospel According to the Son - at 225 pages, a mere telegram by his standards - consists of a first-person narrative by Jesus in a tone its author describes as "neither pious nor satirical". Already, the holy warriors are loading their biggest guns. And Mailer will no doubt relish every skirmish. He used to hang out with boxing champs, and once unwisely joined a bar-room brawl while in the company of a peaceable heavyweight. "I reckon that fighters should stick to fightin'", the boxer gently counselled him, "and writers should stick to writin'." Some hope.
More than 200 hundred years ago, the Enlightenment brought historical study of Bible stories out of the shadows of heresy. Probably the first version of Christ's life published from a non-dogmatic viewpoint came from the scholar Reimarus (1694-1768). Since then, authors have been tempted by the chance to wed these extraordinary tales to the secular forms of the novel, the biography and (during this century) the cinema. Creative minds would let their imagination play over Moses, or Joseph, or even Jesus, and the fury of the orthodox would fall on them - right up to the bemused councils who banned Monty Python's Life of Brian.
Thanks to the tricky doctrine of the Trinity, dramatisations of the Son have proved more troublesome than versions of the Father. And the Old Testament itself abounds with startling scenes of God Behaving Badly. It's hard to think of any post-Biblical Almighty who acts with less conventional pomp than the riddling old grouch who answers Job out of the whirlwind like a sulky retired builder ("Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?"). Since then, the Ancient of Days has turned up in many semi-comic guises. They stretch from the tetchy gaffer of the medieval mystery plays (memorably acted by Brian Glover in Bill Bryden's National Theatre cycle) to the wiseacre in golfing garb played by veteran comic George Burns in Carl Reiner's 1977 film Oh God!
But as Mailer will discover, with the Second Person of the Trinity, the routine scarcely ever alters. In their introduction to a new Oxford World's Classics edition of the King James Bible, Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett recall the "instant scandal and controversy" caused in 1846 by the English translation of a book that painted a portrait of Jesus that, though sympathetic, "was wholly human and non-supernatural". The work was David Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus and the translator was a young intellectual called Mary Ann Evans. She would soon adopt a prudent male pen-name: George Eliot. At this period, the Cambridge theology examiners could still show just what they thought of all this new-fangled sceptical scholarship by asking candidates (as they did in 1848) to "Give the date of the Deluge" . The correct answer? 2348 BC, of course.
Strauss's version of Jesus probably moved further away from church dogma than the Nikos Kazantzakis novel that Martin Scorsese adapted in his Last Temptation of Christ. In theological terms, the sexual and domestic fantasies that landed Scorsese's 1988 film in hellishly hot water merely confirmed that Christ was entirely human as well as entirely divine. Christian orthodoxy has accepted that point since the fourth century AD at least.
Oddly, none of the instant reactions to the news of Mailer's book has registered that a comparable novel already exists. In 1991, the distinguished Portuguese writer Jose Saramago (tipped several times for the Nobel Prize) published his Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Although framed as a third- person narrative, Saramago's take on The Greatest Story Ever Told aims, like Mailer, to escape both piety and mockery to achieve a fully-fledged and challenging reality.
Saramago echoes Kazantzakis and Scorsese as his Jesus, in the years before his ministry, sets up house with Mary Magdalene. (The notion of a long- term liaison with the Magdalene has deep roots in ancient heresy and also turns up in Barbara Thiering's interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls - Jesus the Man.) Saramago's Gospel doesn't stand alone in recent literature. The Four Wise Men by French novelist Michel Tournier poses questions of history and belief in a spirit that rises above dogma and debunking. Clearly, the US clergy and laity who will agitate against Mailer know little and care less about what goes on among writers of decadent Catholic Europe.
So Mailer joins a long roll-call of seekers, doubters and dreamers. With the New Testament, modern research has stimulated fresh tellings of the ancient tales by paying attention to the Gospels as an ill-matched set of contradictory tales. Here, after all, are four sketchy narratives mostly composed from hearsay during the second half of the first century AD, and written in the low-status Koine Greek of Eastern Mediterranean ports - the equivalent of Estuary English, if you like.
We now know (as does Mailer) that the four narratives that made it into the Christian canon were far from unique. In 1946, at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt, the so-called "Gnostic" gospels came to light. These were the holy texts used by isolated communities who mixed knowledge of Jesus's teaching with elements of Platonic and Oriental creeds. They include the Gospel of Truth, the Everlasting Gospel, the Gospel of Peter and the Gospel of Thomas - which has curious parallels with Mailer's project, as it contains the sayings of Jesus without any intervening narrative.
It's worth reflecting that the sheer number of these separate stories tends to disprove the view (now revived by A N Wilson's life of Paul) that Jesus in his time rated as one small-time Jewish apocalyptic preacher among a hundred others. For a minor-league Galilean exorcist, he seems to have had a pretty busy press agent. He even appears in the great history of his age composed by the ambiguously pro-Roman Jewish leader Joseph Ben David (Flavius Josephus) - though most scholars now think that these passages were snuck into Josephus' text by later Christian apologists.
Whatever ecclesiastical flak Mailer has to catch, he is unlikely to finish up in court for his pains. The US Constitution, remember, was devised by a clique of deistical freemasons who just about believed in God but certainly didn't think that fighting over Him was any sort of pastime for a gentleman. Here, the common law of blasphemy still protects, not faith in general and not Christianity in particular, but merely "the formulas of the Church of England as by laws established" . Under that law, Gay News editor Denis Lemon went to jail in the 1970s for publishing a poetic fantasy about Christ on the cross by James Kirkup. And, within the past few months, film director Nigel Wingrove has lost his appeal to the European Court of Human Rights against the refusal to certificate his erotic video about Saint Teresa of Avila, Visions of Ecstasy.
So Mailer's future foes may have more of a chance to (as it were) nail him in Britain than the States. Whatever the fate of the Son's Gospel, it seems a shame that critics aren't prepared to wait for the tale before they curse the teller. After all, what sort of scurrilous film about the life of Christ would you expect from a promiscuously gay Marxist atheist who was eventually murdered by a rent-boy? What we got (thank heavens) was Pier Paolo Pasolini's intensely beautiful and moving Gospel According to Saint Matthew, a work so luminously reverent that it could push Professor Richard Dawkins straight into the nearest pew. "Judge not, that ye be not judged." Now who was it who said that?
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/mailer-the-great-i-am-1280646.html
The Gospel According to the Son
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Gospel According to the Son is a 1999 novel by Norman Mailer. It purports to be the story of Jesus Christ, told autobiographically. [1]
The novel employs first person story-telling, employing the perspective of Jesus. It stays nearly entirely true to the text of the four canonical gospels. Jesus tells his own story, from his birth to a teen-aged virgin named Mary to his execution by crucifixion at the hands of the Romans. Just as in the gospels, he is resurrected from the dead, and ascends to heaven.
Critical reception
Critical response to Mailer's novel was mixed. Jack Miles, writing for Commonweal, found the book "a quiet, sweet, almost wan little book, a kindly offering from a New York Jew to his wife's Bible Belt family." He noted that there was "something undeniably impressive about the restraint" of the style that Mailer undertook in composing the novel. He concluded that the novel was neither one of Mailer's best works, nor would it stand out amongst the bibliography of books inspired by the life of Christ, but that it had received unfairly harsh reviews from other critics.[2]
Critics such as Reynolds Price, writing for the New York Times, pointed to a "lack of inventiveness", based upon the fact that Mailer took so few liberties with the biblical text.
David Gelernter, writing for the National Review, cited the "sheer arrogance" of the very premise of Mailer's book. Yet he went on to agree with Miles that much of the criticism of the book had been "unfair." Gelernter called the book "strikingly orthodox" in its basic view of the character of Christ.[3]
Mailer had largely anticipated some of the savage reviews he would receive for the book. He noted in an interview with Bruce Weber of the New York Times, "The book will get a fair share of bad reviews, but that I take for granted. I call a fair share between 65 percent and 75 percent bad reviews."[4]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gospel_According_to_the_Son
