The Gospel according to the Son.

The Gospel according to the Son Norman Mailer Random House, $22, 242 pp.

What is the opposite of a Teflon personality? A Velcro personality? Whatever it is, Norman Mailer seems to have it. Even when he has committed no outrage, outrage somehow adheres to him.

What distinguishes The Gospel according to the Son, Mailer's new retelling of the gospel story, is not its offensiveness but, as Reynolds Price gently pointed out in the New York Times Book Review, its lack of invention. Though this book is being sold as a novel, it differs only somewhat from a diatessaron, a harmony of the four canonical Gospels. The Virgin Birth is still a virgin birth. The miracles are still miracles. Many of the words of Jesus are quoted verbatim from the Gospel texts. There are no conspiratorial scandals in the passion and death. Mailer retains even the phrase, "His blood be upon us and upon our children." The Resurrection itself comes off right on schedule. In short, there is little to disturb a conservative Christian here. By the same token, there is little to engage anyone who owns a Bible.

Whence then the foaming outrage on the part of so many reviewers? Price has been more the exception than the rule. Given the absence of sensationalism in the narration, most reviewers have hung their indignation on the fact that Mailer makes his diatessaron a Jesus-pseudepigraph; that is, a first-person account in the feigned voice of Jesus. As a literary device, this may or may not work, but if it is an affront to good taste, it is scarcely an unprecedented affront.

No outrage, I note, has greeted the use of essentially the same device by Neale Donald Walsch in the mawkish Conversations with God (Putnam), which was riding high on the best-seller list well before The Gospel according to the Son arrived and still is. None greeted the publication, some months ago, of another first-person narration in a feigned divine voice, Franco Ferrucci's The Life of God (as Told by Himself) (Chicago).

Ferrucci makes a particularly instructive contrast, for his retelling of the gospel (which constitutes, for him, only a chapter in God's long life) is full of picaresque, sometimes grotesque invention. Thus, he makes the words "Let this cup pass from me" refer literally to the cup with which a deranged Jesus is drinking himself into oblivion. As Son explains to Father, shortly before the Last Supper, in a voice "hoarse with wine and dejection,"

   I will have to get them to crucify me so as to be remembered. I could very
   well avoid it, but I have no choice if I want to save at least a part of
   what I have preached. And I began to lie a long time ago. I know very well
   that neither hells nor paradises exist, but this evening at supper I will
   give a special speech about the final judgment, which will never take
   place, and they will believe me. What else can I do?

In despair over his deluded son, God wanders the streets, gets drunk himself, and "end[s] up in bed with a girl, on whose breast I caught myself crying out the name of Mary Magdalene, before submerging again in sleep."

Porca miseria! But ... is this not just the sort of wretched excess that the literati were predisposed to expect from Mailer? They didn't get it. The point can scarcely be overstressed. He didn't do it. But they reacted as if he had done it. It is at such moments that one sees reputation somehow taking on a life of its own, becoming a hypostasis, almost an incarnation, toward which anger or devotion may be directed irrespective of what the historical personage is actually about down here on Earth.

The Gospel according to the Son is, as to its content, a mild, almost deferential Bible story in which Jesus has no vices of any kind and, notably, no sex life whatsoever beyond a vaguely turbulent dream or two in boyhood. On the last page of this Bible story, we are still waiting for the Mailer of uproarious legend to show up, the Mailer who might have written--but hasn't--The Gospel according to Judas. What comes through instead, beating like a drum so loud it drowns out the orchestra, is the familiar gospel story itself. That "material," to speak as novelists speak, dominates this writer; the writer does not dominate the material. I do not mean to say that more invention in the Ferrucci vein would have made for a better book. The risks, the purely literary risks, in writing with imaginative elaboration or revision a story that your readers already know so well, are large unless all you are aiming at is comedy in the Monty Python (The Life of Brian) or Gore Vidal (Live from Golgotha) manner. Their kind of comic target is easy to hit precisely because their readers already know the story so well. Parody is always funnier if you know the original. Unfortunately, if you are not writing comedy, there are risks in failing to invent as well as in inventing.

What goes for the contents of The Gospel according to the Son goes also for the style, though I find the style far and away the most memorable feature of the book. Groans have been groaned over the quasi-biblical diction Mailer devises for his Jesus-narrator, but consider the problem to which that diction is the solution. Once Mailer chose to write in the person of Jesus, he had to write in language that would not depart entirely from what his readers remember of the language of Jesus. To do otherwise would be to risk unintentional comedy. Played in earnest, this "further words of" game is almost impossible to win if only because success, when it does come, comes by the total suppression of an author's own voice. Mailer makes things particularly difficult for himself by requiring Jesus not just to utter some new utterances but to play the role of evangelist and tell the whole story. The whole text has to come out of his mouth. What style can possibly work for that?

The style he comes up with has been approvingly characterized by no less a critic than Frank Kermode as "sermo humilis." It might more fully be described as the plain speech of William Tyndale with the more noticeable archaisms edited out. There is something undeniably impressive about the restraint of this style. Its surface calm exceeds that of The Executioner's Song, itself a stylistic exception to the clamorous Mailer rule. But how strange it is to be struck more by what a writer has escaped than by what he has achieved.

Searching for a comparison to Mailer's diction-by-subtraction, I found myself thinking of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, the 1991 update of an earlier update of the King James Version. The NRSV is in the main a revision by subtraction. As late as the 1952 Revised Standard Version, much of the archaic Jacobean vigor was retained. The 1991 NRSV sacrifices that vigor without gaining the very different kind of energy that only a fresh translation from the original Hebrew and Greek can release.

In short, one cannot achieve an effective idiom either for the Bible or for a Bible-retelling by beginning in King James English and then doubling back to remove the more noticeable archaisms. The effect for the reader, if one does that, is the effect of eating apple peels. The taste reminds one of apple. There is even the occasional morsel of actual apple. But the experience overall is an experience of frustration.

Such is the experience of reading The Gospel according to the Son. Mailer's real voice is missing. The voice of Jesus as one might hear it in a contemporary translation of the Gospels from the original Greek is missing. Even the vigor of faux-Jacobean is missing. What is present is only Mailer's almost eerie ability to manage all these subtractions and still have something left. If in this impotent, denatured language he had chosen to offer some shocking or otherwise arresting revision of the received story, the effect of the contrast might still have been strong, though it is perhaps late in the day for that sort of thing.

As it is, Mailer has offered a quiet, sweet, almost wan little book, a kindly offering from a New York Jew to his wife's Bible Belt family. It won't loom large either in the Mailer canon or on the list of artworks inspired by the life of Christ, but it is an honest effort that deserves much better than it has received.

Jack Miles is the author of God: A Biography (Vintage).