[Ancient Evenings] is hands down the most surprising work Mailer has ever offered. It really is set entirely in an alien long ago, just as the author had been promising during the decade he took to write it. Yet no amount of advance speculation proves adequate to the thing itself: an artifact of evident craftsmanship and utterly invisible significance.

A lengthy journey begins with the agonies of death ("Volcanic lips give fire, wells bubble. Bone lies like rubble upon the wound"). Surviving this fiery purgation is the ka (diminished soul) of an Egyptian named Menenhetet II. After experiencing the mummification of his discarded body, this ghost meets the kindred spirit of his great-grandfather Menenhetet I….

The book is already some 230 pages old when Menenhetet I eases into this narration, and none of the characters seems in any hurry to pick up the pace. Worse, Mailer shuns the devices that can make long pieces of fiction irresistible. Suspense is banished: everything has already happened in Ancient Evenings, not only historically, but also in the lives of its people. Nothing is surprising, except perhaps how polymorphously perverse and consistently swinish the ancients were, according to their newest historian….

Language might yet have made Ancient Evenings a page turner, and the novel does offer brief, poetic passages. The shimmer and heat of the Nile, the blaze of Egyptian architecture when it was new and radiant with epochal ambition, the perfume and soft light of a harem garden: all enjoy moments of intense realization. But such moods are continually broken by ludicrous sentences: "In either case, my Pharaoh's mind was now concerned with buttocks." Or: "Now, with the redolence of my nose, I watched and admired the delicacy with which the Pharaoh ate." Mailer's historical posing stalls an already leisurely narration….

The sex in the book is equally droning. The penile principle predominates; it is the staff of life and the stuff of seemingly endless repetition. Pharaohs spontaneously impose themselves on the underling, male or female, who happens to be closest. Indiscriminate rutting is a sign of power, sodomy the proof of triumph. Male-on-male copulation, in particular, becomes so predictable that the nonexplicit stretches of narrative come as moments of noncomic relief.

Mailer is a member of the postwar generation of writers who still believed in the possibility of the Great American Novel. This notion always flirted with silliness, but its power to spur the ambition of young authors cannot be discounted. The paradox of Mailer's career is that his pursuit of this white whale proved the quest in his case unnecessary. He became a major writer without becoming a major novelist. His instinct to abandon fiction for long periods was, given his talents and temperament, entirely correct. His unique value among his contemporaries proved to be the witness he could bear to his age and its possible consequences. His energy and imagination have been aroused most keenly by doubt, the sense that every act, individual and civic, leads perilously into the unknown. Looking backward is not the job such a mind performs best, as Ancient Evenings proves. The book is a gesture of obeisance to graven images and an abstract ideal, dutifully performed by an inherently disruptive spirit.