The Gospel According to the Son
Mailer's novel narrated in the first person by Jesus, published by Random House on 2 May 1997 — a spare retelling of the Gospels meant to correct what Mailer saw as their 'committee prose.' Drew sharply divided reviews; defended by Mailer through a long publicity tour.
The Gospel According to the Son, Mailer’s novel narrated in the first person by Jesus, published by Random House on 2 May 1997 (224 pp., $22; London: Little, Brown, 18 September). It is dedicated to his nine children and acknowledges his wife Norris, his assistant Judith McNally, and his friends Michael Lennon and Robert Lucid, among others. A spare, plainspoken retelling of the Gospels, it was conceived to “make comprehensible for myself what Fulton Oursler called The Greatest Story Ever Told” (97.2) and to improve on what Mailer judged the “committee prose” of the synoptic gospels. Coming after Ancient Evenings, he reasoned: “If I can write about Osiris and Ra, then certainly the New Testament is not going to be that difficult to do” (97.3). Mailer first wished to publish it anonymously, but Random House — wary of the Joe Klein/Primary Colors episode — demurred (97.7).
Reception
The reviews split hard. John Updike (New Yorker, “Stones into Bread”) and Frank Kermode (New York Review of Books) were favorable, and Reynolds Price (New York Times Book Review) admired the bold first person while finding the book under-invented; against them, Michiko Kakutani (New York Times, two weeks early again — provoking Mailer’s earlier complaint, 95.36), Paul Gray (Time), Steven Moore (Washington Post), David Gelernter (National Review), and A. N. Wilson (Daily Telegraph) were negative. Mailer defended the book across a months-long tour (97.5–97.23e), insisting he did not “think of myself as Jesus Christ” (97.7) and that he wrote it “for those people who are like myself, who don’t have a clear idea of what Jesus is” (97.14). Seven excerpts are reprinted in The Time of Our Time (98.7).