The Gospel According to the Son.

The Gospel According to the Son, by Norman Mailer (Random House, 242 pp., $22)

Norman Mailer's The Gospel According to the Son is a rare spectacle: a novel powered not by imagination or language or character or story but by sheer arrogance. Try to fly such a vehicle and, naturally, you crash and burn. But I don't have the heart to join the tut-tutting crowd at the scene as the novel is scraped up and hauled away and the wounded author is rushed from the field. The Gospel is no mere whim but an obvious project for Mailer, and its failure is saddening. He has long been fascinated by the spiritual and supernatural. He has written brilliantly about antiquity. His prose at its best is powerful and his imagination is large, particularly when the topic is violence. Although the novel fails, the wreckage reveals something interesting about the author and about the retelling of Bible stories.

Mailer has been attacked for ruining the sacred character of the story, which is unfair; his book is strikingly orthodox. There is no trace of the Vie de Jesus tradition here. Mailer's Jesus is precisely the Son of God, who walks on water, heals the sick, raises the dead, and is resurrected to sit beside his Father in Heaven. Given which, the author has also been attacked for impersonating a Christian. If you believe this story you must be a Christian, and yet Mailer is not, and so he is accused of insincerity. Which is also unfair; a novelist is supposed to believe that his material is plausible, not true. But the charge of insincerity does point us in the general direction of the book's basic flaw. Piety limits a man but also strengthens him. When you simulate piety, you get the limits but not the strength. If you are going to retell the Bible, your duty is to add something, and Mailer has chosen instead to subtract: his story is like an actual Gospel with all the facts in place, but the intensity that comes of faith has been squeezed out. The wrung-out rind is insipid.

If you were going to add something, what would it be? The Gospel authors knew the feel of life in first-century Israel, and so did their earliest readers--and at any rate the details didn't matter to them. Mailer could have shown us what that life was like. His Ancient Evenings (1983) is a puzzling, horrifying, magnificent picture of ancient Egypt. No one has ever re-created such a distant era more vividly. ("Beneath the songs and disputes of the birds came a steady pumping from one shaduf above another, lifting water from the pool to a stream bed that led down to another pool ... no sound was more virtuous than water being lifted By the strength of slaves. The streams were beautiful. The waters flowed over glazed clay and bricks and over precious stones.")

In his Gospel Mailer has set himself once again the task of building images out of authentic material--the sights and sounds, tastes and smells, of the world Jesus knew. A daunting technical challenge. But this time he struggles listlessly and fails. The Lord can "destroy a kingdom as easily as a mouse is trodden underfoot!" Is that so? Upon how many mice has the author trodden? His Jesus is limp and colorless. "After school, on days when we would scuffle with each other, I would lose such fights as often as I won. How, then, could I be the Son of the Lord?" Such great questions are juxtaposed often with trivial domestic concerns--a defensible strategy, but executed without grace or conviction. The story gets dished out with stalwart indifference, like mashed potatoes in a third-grade lunch line. "Each day I came to understand a little more of why the Lord had chosen me." Check. "The soul can feel empty contemplating its sins." Okay. "And I prayed that the Lord would always speak through me." Check. "By the age of eight, I could even read the language of the old Israelites." So what? Hebrew at this point was written in the same alphabet as Jesus's native Aramaic, and the languages are similar. The author tries to resuscitate his dead prose by hanging out exclamation points. "Of course, they were terrified of evil from without? "Of a sudden, I was up and above the waters! I was walking!" Yeah, yeah.

This Gospel is written in generic Bible-translation style--not the pricey Museum-Quality Reproduction but the Epcot Center Facsimile of King James English. The results run from awkward to ludicrous. "Often would I ponder," etc. The author tries to make modern thoughts at home in the ancient narrative by writing ponderously, like a tourist attempting to get through to foreigners by shouting. "I do not know how else to say it." For the young carpenter, it is not easy "to find communion with the wood."

Don't conclude that, because Mailer doesn't tell this story like a Christian, he tells it like a Jew. Jewish scholars have long rejected as impossible the Gospel account of the legal proceedings culminating in the Crucifixion, and Mailer is scrupulously faithful to the Gospels. The Gospels and the Jews disagree radically on the Pharisees: Jews see them as heroes and martyrs struggling to uphold the legal framework of Torah under the killing pressure of Rome. Mailer of course lines up with the Gospels, and it isn't clear that he understands what the normative Jewish view is. Of the Pharisees, he has Jesus say that they "did not believe that more would be demanded of them than good attendance at the synagogue." But the Pharisees demanded much more. The Torah commandments they codified governed every aspect of daily life. And in the normative tradition that emerged from their teaching, no principle was more important than mitzvah tzrichah kavanah--you have accomplished nothing whatsoever by carrying out a Torah commandment, zero, unless your heart is in it.

So the author isn't part of the Christian tradition, or the Jewish tradition, or his own tradition as represented by Ancient Evenings, and for good measure he has deliberately shot his prose in the foot. And thus his story is to be "leaned upon no more than a bush that tears free from its roots and blows around in the wind." This is one of his more effective passages --Jesus referring to the tales peddled by worn-out old men.

Still, it's not enough to dismiss the Gospel as a failure and move on, because its failure makes the nature of Mailer's real achievements clearer. Mailer at his best is a great writer, but his strong, distinctive style didn't come naturally; he struggled to create it. The brilliant phrases that flood a book with truth like the stained-glass light of a church never crop up, in Mailer, with the casual grace you encounter in Updike or Bellow, say, or Nabokov or White or Fitzgerald. But they do crop up. The Naked and the Dead was Mailer's first novel and made his reputation; it is a plodding book. ("He had made furious efforts for a time, launched that attack, had kept the troops patrolling constantly, but deep inside himself, unadmitted, he was becoming frightened.") The book ran seven hundred pages, and it taught its young author that editors were dispensable. But he obviously concluded also, to his lasting credit, that if he was going to be a famous author he might as well learn how to write. And there is nothing stronger or more vivid in modern American fiction than (for example) the opening of Harlot's Ghost (1991). A skid on an icy road: "The wall of forest on one side stuttered up to me, and my front end yawed when I spun the wheel, whereupon car and I rushed viciously across the lane toward the other wall of pines at the far shoulder." Violence was his specialty; he became a master at putting over violent characters and violent stories.

Some great artists (say Degas or Rodin or Picasso) are born with brilliant technique. Others who are just as great (like Cezanne) are born with more will and insight than technical means--and if you are a great artist in this second category, your work gains in depth, integrity, and power from your dogged technical struggles. Lack of fluency concentrates the mind. Of course there are disadvantages too. Unlike Updike or Bellow or Nabokov or White or Fitzgerald, Mailer isn't funny; he works too hard. And when his energy runs low, he never turns out a graceful minor work. He perpetrates a major wreck.

But a book this bad is the price we pay for Mailer's type of talent. It is a testament to the fine line he walks between brilliance and disaster, the risks he runs and the stupendous energy he pours into his work when he is writing well. The Gospel is a rotten book and the critics hated it--but not many of them liked Ancient Evenings or Harlot's Ghost either, and for all their faults both were masterpieces. Along with a million other readers, I am rooting for Mailer; if he pulls himself together, steers out of the skid, and gets this show back on the road, American literature will be stronger for it.

Mr. Gelernter, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of the semi-novel 1939. He is working on a book about Saul and David.