Reviewers have not been kind to Norman Mailer’s 30th book, a first-person account of the life and death of Jesus called “The Gospel According to the Son.”
Literary critic Frank Kermode, in the New York Review of Books, proclaimed it “a book of considerable intellectual force” but said that infusing Jesus “with a strong dose of Mailer {was} in some measure another self-advertisement.” Novelist Reynolds Price, in the New York Times Book Review, applauded Mailer’s bold use of the first person but was puzzled by his general lack of inventiveness. “Even the most conservative Christian should find little to reject,” Price wrote.