Here it is at last, more than a decade in the making,… Norman Mailer's long-awaited "Egyptian novel." For months the publishing trade press has hummed with reports of responses to the work, and the range of compliments already on file is striking. The most recent compliment came from Mailer's alma mater, Harvard; usually reserved in its relations with famous sons and daughters, the university put his photograph on the cover of its alumni magazine this spring and filled pages with an interview probing the meanings of "Ancient Evenings." Nobody doubts the newsworthiness of memoirs by government officials or biographies of film stars by their embittered children, but pre-publication interest in imaginative writing is invariably more limited. For a novel set in Egypt before the birth of Christ to rouse levels of excitement on the order of those inspired by "Ancient Evenings" is astonishing.

Not more astonishing, though, I found, than the excitement stirred by the book's opening chapters—an excitement unrelated to hype. Swiftly "Ancient Evenings" pulls its reader inside a consciousness different from any hitherto met in fiction. A soul or body entombed is struggling to burst free, desperate not alone for light and air but for prayer and story—promised comforters that have been treacherously withheld or stolen. Dwelling within this consciousness we relive the "experience" of an Egyptian body undergoing burial preparations, sense the soul's overwhelming yearnings, within an unquiet grave, for healing that no physical treatment can provide. All is strange, dark, intense, mysteriously coherent.

A second voice speaks. Offering a kind of taunting succor, it commences a story of the gods—the myth of Isis and Osiris which in this telling is made utterly new, indeed seems to have been given utterance by the strewn bones and limbs themselves. I looked up at the end of this section of the book, simultaneously moved and (I am speaking seriously) ashamed—troubled by my own habitual skepticism, my trained resistance to whatever is heavily promoted. Would it not prove impossible for a work so well begun to be anything but magnificent over all? Was not the book in my hand certain to prove the truth of its author's contention that he was capable of producing a masterpiece totally unique and incomparably splendid?

The answer to both questions is no. "Ancient Evenings" turns out to be neither magnificent nor a masterpiece. What is more, describing the book simply as a failure—a near-miss earning respect for noble ambitions and partial triumphs—will not do. The case is that, despite the brilliance of those first 90 pages, this 700-page work is something considerably less than a heroic venture botched in the execution. It is, speaking bluntly, a disaster, and the reasons why wants careful inquiry.

Just as one tends to be a shade slow in absorbing the evidence that a powerful imagination is working with stunning intensity at the start of this book, so one resists acknowledging that a sorry descent has begun as one moves deeper in. The opening, mythological frame of "Ancient Evenings" gives way, in the third through sixth of the book's seven sections, to a social drama—a dinner party at the palace of Rameses IX (circa 1100 B.C.) marking a festival called the Night of the Pig; persons of faith are required by the gods to act lewdly and speak obscenely on the occasion.

Guests at the Pharaoh's party consist of the Pharaoh's "Overseer of the Cosmetic Box" and the Overseer's family—his wife, 6-year-old son and the 6-year-old's great-grandfather. The speaker for most of the evening is Menenhetet, the great-grandfather: former general, harem-master, magician, priest, grave-robber and raconteur…. Menenhetet has been reincarnated three times; since he discourses knowledgeably in the book's final chapter on Greek and Roman religious beliefs, his four lives appear to span roughly 1,000 years; it's his account of his lives that speedily sinks the work. (pp. 1, 34)

Two problems beset this storytelling from its start. The first problem is that the mentality of the dynastic world, magically imagined in the book's opening pages, is replaced with fearful abruptness by the preoccupations and obsessions of a late 20th-century mind—Norman Mailer's—as soon as the narrator settles into his dinner party discourse. The second problem is that, in dramatizing those obsessions, Mailer relentlessly suppresses his own sense of the ridiculous—a deed few readers are likely to emulate.

One of Mailer's obsessions is with the need for social forms that honor the human capacity for exuberance rather than thwart it by prohibiting vulgarity and inhibiting emotional expression. This obsession is embodied in a set of characters who, though meant to be perceived as exhilaratingly free-spirited, stand forth instead as ludicrous blends of Mel Brooks and the Marquis de Sade….

Another of Mailer's obsessions is with our refusals to acknowledge our animality and our need to speak our being through acts of violence. This theme—which reverberates through Menenhetet's speech on that evening 3,000 years ago—is dramatized in a series of scenes that are pitiably foolish in conception and executed at staggering length. During the postlude to the Battle of Kadesh, we're told that the Charioteer came upon the royal lion Hera-Ra "half-asleep under the full moon." The lion gave "a great broad grin" at the sight of him, "rolled over on his back, spread his legs, showed me the depths of his anus and the embrace of his front paws and invited me to roll on his belly."…

Thereafter pages are devoted to a battlefield constitutional during which Menenhetet learns the satisfactions of cannibalism. (p. 34)

The modern obsession most absurd in its appearance in "Ancient Evenings" has to do, predictably, with female sexuality as a wound. It surfaces in the extended chronicle of Menenhetet's passion for an overweight concubine named Honey-Ball, "the greatest little queen of them all," whose "hips were like the hips of a horse"—a person who once displeased the Pharaoh and, for punishment, had a toe amputated. Impossible to summarize this story in neutral tones. Powerfully drawn to each other, Honey-Ball and the Charioteer are nevertheless unhappy about their lovemaking until, by accident, a breakthrough occurs…. [It] emerges that the place of the missing toe is a G-spot. (pp. 34, 35)

The farther one proceeds in "Ancient Evenings" the longer one lingers over any page or passage bare of embarrassments. Here is a carefully researched chapter on the tactical maneuvers preceding the Battle of Kadesh: Pause, speculate about its sources. Here is a chariot charge, vigorously evoked: Pause, savor. Here the Nile rises and the river-bank folk sense the change: Stiff old school historians, such as J. H. Breasted, had their own eloquence on the subject, but Mailer's eloquence is at least not negligible. Here is the Charioteer catching his first glimpse of the Pharaoh: Concentrate on the fine phrases.

But in truth release and escape are elusive. Arguably the obsessions that control this work, considered abstractly, possess dignity. The writer who gives himself up to them is, at the minimum, a challenger—someone admirably scornful of the diminution of his humanity that arid decorum, politic timidity and the like seek to enforce. Conceivably the underlying motives deserve praise. Yet too much, far too much, is demanded of the reader for that praise to be easily granted. The early annoyances in the book—idioms like "kiss My foot" used minus irony as elevated utterance; seemingly gratuitous eruptions of late 20th-century colloquialism and so on—can be shrugged off. But from chapter to chapter episodes of pointless, painful, unintended hilarity flood ever more absurdly upon each other. Material in the Mel Brooks mode is repeatedly presented as though it were without comic dimension. The sound of epic elevation time and again is drowned by a voice resembling Howard Cosell's: "Behold, there was blood on my King's leg … and the look in his eye was not good." There are talking horses and women who shout in bed that: "I am the Keel … My Secret Name is Thigh of Isis … I am the Rudder … In My Name is Leg of the Nile."

Everywhere the assumption is that bisexuality, aphrodisiac obscenity and anxiety about whether a "member will stay firm" were key features of Eastern sensuality…. And, for a final epic note, we're offered portentous metaphors of human life as a tide-beaten boat, "washed by the swells of time"—echoes of the concluding sentence of a book difficult to coerce into meaningful connection with XXth Dynasty Egypt: Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby."

"Why did Mailer write it?" the author asks himself in the interview appearing in Harvard magazine. "What is he saying that means something to him? The man we know. What is in this?"

The first answer the author returns is that he wished to write a long novel, and "to do a long book, you would want to take risks. Why not? How dignify it if large risks aren't taken?" In studying the past, moreover, "dealing with Egypt, its gold and its pharaohs," he came "to an understanding of the wealthy I've never had before" and glimpsed a teacher's mission: that of awakening others to their provinciality. "I want people to realize, my God, there are wholly different points of view that can be as interesting as our own. In other words, probably a social evening in Egypt … that period 3,000 years ago, was as interesting as an evening in New York today."

The ambition to teach has often been visible in Mailer's books, and it has seldom stifled either wit or self-awareness. The writer's ruling assumption has been that, regardless of subject or form, all his feeling and remembering, inventing and reporting, must be accompanied by critical activity…. The surprising perspective—the leap offering instant release from bondage to cliché—is what we have come to expect in even the shortest piece from this pen. But that expectation is nowhere satisfied in "Ancient Evenings."

Intelligence has disappeared before from Mailer's work—witness "Maidstone." Invariably, though, it returns, and the point warrants emphasis. In a world in which the beautiful is "decreed in the marketplace" (Ezra Pound's phrase), the jettisoning of self-criticism in a widely publicized novel written under who knows what financial pressure can not seriously be regarded as mysterious. What can be so regarded is the frequency with which this author, in dark hours of the past, has renewed his inventiveness and wit. During the decade of labor on "Ancient Evenings" Norman Mailer produced seven other books, including "Marilyn," "The Fight" and the gripping saga of Gary Gilmore. It's possible that "the Egypt book" is a darker hour than any preceding it in his career; surely the author's hold on the title that's been his for a full decade and a half—the title of America's most consistently entertaining writer—has been weakened.

But Mailer's past record of resilience, productivity and readiness to leave disaster behind makes deep gloom—the overwhelming feeling as one grasps that "Ancient Evenings" has collapsed—seem inappropriate. So too does the announcement that the author is already at work on a new volume of fiction, unconnected to the work at hand. (pp. 35-6)