[There] can be little doubt that in some important respects "Ancient Evenings" is a triumph of technique over what for many writers would have proved forbiddingly intractable material. By a simple and altogether plausible use of mental telepathy, Mr. Mailer is able to compress into one narrative voice, speaking over the course of a single, albeit interminable, evening, an account not only of the 19th and 20th dynasties of ancient Egypt (1320–1121 B.C.), but also of the four lives of a heroic figure who manages to reincarnate himself three times over the course of 180 years.

What's more, by achieving this technical victory, Mr. Mailer has created a world ideally suited to many of his pet theories and fixations—psychic darts, single combat, staring contests, mindreading, vibrations of evil and virtue, all manner of magic and sorcery, the rich possibilities of sex in all its forms, the mysteries of excrement and, above all, the curious fantasy that one can literally reconceive oneself by dying in the act of sexual intercourse, and thereby defeat death and live forever. Such theories and fixations have often seemed preposterous in Mr. Mailer's writing on contemporary subjects, but they fit seamlessly into his conception of ancient Egypt, which may well explain why he was attracted to the subject in the first place.

But alas, for all the rounds he has won in this historical novel, Mr. Mailer appears not to know what every competent writer of historical novels needs to know—indeed what must be understood instinctively by any good storyteller, which is what one certainly would call Mr. Mailer, at least on the basis of his past achievements. What every good historical novelist knows is that once you've established the landscape, the culture and the precise exotic flavor of the world you're imagining, you start making them work for you instead of continuing to work for them. In short, you use them to tell your story.

But Mr. Mailer never ceases to describe and detail and seize new imaginative territory, and to do so with prose that can only be described as rich to the point of indigestibility. At some point in any novel, a reader's mind wants to relax and be borne along by the action of the story or at least by some irresistible logic that the author might be unfolding.

But all the way through "Ancient Evenings," one keeps having to absorb new rituals and ceremonies and landscapes, described with prose that rarely acknowledges that it has successfully created a world. And the effort to keep taking all this in is simply exhausting. Or else it's just that Mr. Mailer's story isn't strong enough to lift us out of the prose. Or else some new cosmology he is trying to unfold is too dumbfounding.

Something has gone wrong. It may be that 10 years was too long a stretch of time to spend on the book, especially when its writing had to be interrupted by the production of three other books. Or perhaps Mr. Mailer worked with too much determination to prove that he could finally deliver the big novel he had promised for so long and thus used too much muscle when he should have relaxed.

Whatever the reason, "Ancient Evenings" lacks the pace and rhythm of good storytelling. It walks when one wants it to run, marches when one wants it to fly and only soars when one is at last too weary to hold on to it anymore. Somewhere there may be profundities coiling in its vast design. But if there are, my eyes just got too tired to see them.