The Gospel According to the Son Book

There was a cloud of tepid foreshadowing hanging over me as I went into this Mailer novel. It was decried as a soft and near lifeless work, a dedication of sorts from the secular Jewish Mailer to his then wife of and from America's Bible Belt.

But it was more than that. After reading Mailer for the last few years and hearing (in an interview with Charlie Rose I believe) that he willfully altered his style with every novel, I found myself more and enamored with his authorial ethos. Unlike, say, a Hemingway or a Faulkner, or a Pynchon, all of whom never seem to stray too far beyond their respective aesthetic spheres (and in some cases become almost slavish to them) Mailer ostensibly broke and re-broke his teeth with each new written endeavor.

And he was damn good at it too. Read Ancient Evenings and then The Gospel According to the Son and ask yourself how these two disparate works could have possibly been written by the same author. The former work wallowed in the excess and atavistic ritual of Ancient Egypt where the latter is almost monkish in its humanizing restraint in portraying Jesus Christ. And that Mailer was so able to characterize the Christian Messiah so believably as ideological rebel and conflicted man, as well as more than a bit vulnerable to the weaknesses of his partial humanity, while remaining mostly loyal to the gospels (save some genuinely funny and insightful editorial moments of Jesus's post death depictions in the hands of many who had never even met him) is a hell of a writerly feat in and of itself.

I read this in a day, I'm not saying you'll be carried by it as much as I was if only because at this point I'm probably far past the point of critical Stockholm syndrome concerning Mailer, but give it a shot to see a meditative, contemplative and, just as important, believable portrayal of the carpenter who, for many, divided history.