TWO AMERICAN LITERARY ICONS AT IT AGAIN : MAILER'S `GOSPEL' JUST DOESN'T WORK.

Byline: Michiko Kakutani The New York Times

Title: ``The Gospel According to the Son''

Author: Norman Mailer

Data: 242 pages, Random House; $22

Perhaps it was inevitable that in this memoir-mad age, Norman Mailer, never a writer exactly known for his lack of hubris, would pen a novel in the form of an autobiography of Jesus.

In an interview sent out by Random House with ``The Gospel According to the Son,'' Mailer observed that he felt up to the dare of channeling Jesus because his own literary celebrity had endowed him with ``a slight understanding of what it's like to be half a man and half something else, something larger.''

``Obviously, a celebrity is a long, long, long, long way from the celestial,'' he said, ``but nonetheless it does mean that you have two personalities you live with all the time. One is your simple self, so to speak, which is to some degree still like other people, and then there's the opposite one, the media entity, which gives you power that you usually don't know how to use well. So, the parallel was stronger than I realized.''

The resulting book is a sort of novelized ``Jesus Christ Superstar'' starring Jesus as an ambivalent pop star and guru: a silly, self-important and at times inadvertently comical book that reads like a combination of ``Godspell,'' Nikos Kazantzakis' ``Last Temptation of Christ'' and one of those new, dumbed-down Bible translations, all seasoned with Mailer's own eccentric views on God and faith and the conservation of spiritual energy.

The narrator of ``The Gospel According to the Son'' isn't the purposeful Son of God we met in Mark's Gospel or the forgiving Jesus described by Luke. This isn't the garrulous teacher introduced by Matthew, or the Jesus who openly proclaimed his Messiahship in John. Mailer's Jesus is an altogether more ordinary fellow: petulant, irritable and ravaged by ``thoughts of lust,'' a carpenter who just happened to discover at the age of 30 that he had another calling.

For that matter, everything in this volume is a pale, user-friendly version of what it is in the Bible. Miracles aren't so miraculous here: in the loaves and fishes scene, we're told that Jesus ``divided them exceedingly small, until there were a hundred pieces of bread from each loaf'' and hundreds of flakes of fish, ``a triumph of the Spirit rather than an enlargement of matter.'' Even Judas is given plausible, human motives for his betrayal: As Mailer's Jesus tells it, Judas was angry at him for appearing to scorn the poor and for failing to lead a revolt against the Romans.

Throughout ``The Gospel According to the Son,'' Jesus suffers terrible doubts about his role as redeemer and worries about the dissipation of his miracle-working powers as though he were an athlete trying to conserve his energies before an important game. After restoring the daughter of Jairus to life, he wonders: ``Had I drawn too deeply upon the powers of the Lord? Would it have been wiser to save His efforts for other matters?''

This Jesus is patronizing about his disciples, sarcastic about his human flock and quick to anger. ``So many miracles,'' he complains, ``so little gain.'' For some reason, he is also extremely sensitive to smells, be it the odor of greed radiated by the devil, the scent of exhaustion that clings to John the Baptist or Jesus' own sometimes sour breath.

Though Mailer apparently wants to try to flesh out Jesus as a character by exploring his inner conflicts and oh-so-human problems, these efforts to make him relevant - combined with the book's flattened-out, new-agey language - have a way of making him seem less like the historical personage we have come to know as Jesus (never mind the Christian Saviour), than just another chatty cult leader. Sometimes Mailer's Jesus sounds an awful lot like a guest on Oprah. Sometimes he sounds like Do and Ti (a k a Bo and Peep, Pig and Guinea). And sometimes he sounds like Luke Skywalker, the apprentice Jedi trying to master the Force.

Mailer's Jesus suffers from repressed memory syndrome. (Although Joseph supposedly told him about his miraculous birth when he was 12, he does not recall the discussion until he is 30.) He complains that his mother doesn't understand him. And he feels conflicted about his identity. (``I felt as if I were a man enclosing another man within.'')

To complicate matters further, the first-person narrative takes the sorts of sentiments that followers might think or say about Jesus and puts them in his own mouth. Often he sounds downright boastful.

``I could see how I wanted to be all things to all men,'' he says. ``Each could take from me a separate wisdom. Indeed, I thought: Many roads lead to the Lord.''

As for Jesus' Father, He comes across as a weary, withholding Dad. Having died and been resurrected, Jesus says he remains ``on the right hand of God.'' ``My Father, however, does not often speak to me,'' he adds. ``Nonetheless, I honor Him. Surely He sends forth as much love as He can offer, but His love is not without limit.''

In fact, as Mailer sees it, this God has had great victories, but He has also had great defeats, like the Holocaust and the death of His son. Mailer's Jesus further suggests that the words from the Bible ``God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son that whosoever believed in Him should not perish but have eternal life'' were written after the fact to rationalize his death, for God ``saw how to gain much from defeat by calling it victory.''

No doubt this conception of God as a limited Being striving to do His best against great odds provides Mailer with a means of explaining the cruelties of history, but his portrait of God is not, essentially, a philosophical one. Rather, it is a novelist's portrait of his hero's father. Indeed Mailer's Father and Son have a lot in common: both are full of themselves, both are fond of self-dramatization and both tend to feel put upon by their public responsibilities.

In recent years, Mailer has tried to dress his all-too-human subjects, Lee Harvey Oswald and Pablo Picasso, in the garments of heroism. This time he has tried to do the reverse, with equally distressing results. In trying to describe Jesus and God as accessible novelistic characters, Mailer has turned them into familiar contemporary types: he has knocked them off their celestial thrones and turned them into what he knows best, celebrities.

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Photo: (1--2) Norman Mailer

``The Gospel According to the Son''