A towering figure in American literature, Norman Mailer has
in recent years reached a new level of accessibility and
power. His last novel, The Castle in the Forest,
revealed fascinating ideas about faith and the nature of
good and evil. Now Mailer offers his concept of the nature
of God. His conversations with his friend and literary
executor, Michael Lennon, show this writer at his most
direct, provocative, and challenging. “I think,” writes
Mailer, “that piety is oppressive. It takes all the air out
of thought.”
In moving, amusing, probing, and
uncommon dialogues conducted over three years but whose
topics he has considered for decades, Mailer establishes his
own system of belief, one that rejects both organized
religion and atheism. He presents instead a view of our
world as one created by an artistic God who often succeeds
but can also fail in the face of determined opposition by
contrary powers in the universe, with whom war is waged for
the souls of humans. In turn, we have been given
freedom–indeed responsibility–to choose our own paths.
Mailer trusts that our individual behavior–always a complex
mix of good and evil–will be rewarded or punished with a
reincarnation that fits the sum of our lives.
Mailer
weighs the possibilities of “intelligent design” at the same
time avowing that sensual pleasures were bestowed on us by
God; he finds fault with the Ten Commandments–because
adultery, he avers, may be a lesser evil than others
suffered in a bad marriage–and he holds that technology was
the Devil’s most brilliant creation.
In short,
Mailer is original and unpredictable in this inspiring
verbal journey, a unique vision of the world in which “God
needs us as much as we need God.”
From The Naked
and the Dead to The Executioner’s Song and
beyond, Mailer’s major works have engaged such themes as
war, politics, culture, and sex. Now, in this small yet
important book, Mailer, in a modest, well-spoken style,
gives us fresh ways to think about the largest subject of
them all.
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