NORMAN MAILER '43 had to write this brick of a book. After all that grand talk and those grandstanding performances in which he told how he could go so many rounds in the rings with the heavyweights--Tolstoy and Hemingway and God knows who else--he was compelled to write a truly big book. Size alone, of course, was not the only requirement, though, to be sure, Mailer had in mind a book that the eye might train on, even on a shelf with Melville, Prost, and Dostoyevsky. No, more than that, the book would have to be big on imagination. It would have to be sprung in its entirety out of Mailer's white-maned skull, not a work which might have alleged against it the taint of journalism (notwithstanding all the protests against dividing fiction and nonfiction which have emanated from one of the country's most inventive, entertaining and best journalists) Ancient Evenings was to be at once Mailer's monument of unaging intellect and his clinching demonstration of imaginative virtuosity--if one can consciously strive for the latter while hoping to achieve the former.

What better way to make good on all those boasts than by writing about ancient Egypt? That's about as far back and as far away as one can go and still have a culture to work with (not even Mailer would try to make a literary One Million Years, B.C.). Inventing almost completely an exotic and complex world so far removed from modern consciousness would provide the necessary feat of imagination to fill out Mailer's corpus. Nothing less than this sort of overweening ambition could have caused the mess of Ancient Evenings.

In truth, Ancient Evenings does achieve some of the cleaning of the slate it sets out to do and goes a ways towards creating a new world, however bizarre that world is. As evinced in the story of Menenhetet, a peasant who rises to the post of First Charioteer in the reign of Ramses II and succeeds in getting reincarnated three or four times--ancient Egypt is a land of many weird rites and customs, filled with magic, telepathy and violence. Menenhetet relates his odyssey from a Nile village to the Pharaoh's chariot in the glorious battle against the Hittites at Kadesh to the beds of the royal harem and the Queen from beyond the grave. He also prefaces the tale with a recasting of a number of stories from Egyptian mythology, a section which is by far the finest of the book. Surreal, unlabored and intriguing, it unfortunately scuds by quickly. Which leaves the rest of this endless book.

To put succinctly, Menenhetet's life is a long series of extraordinary feats such as running over a mountain, carrying a chariot or slaying more Hittites than you could ever shake a scarab at--and crashing humiliations like getting exiled to a desert outpost and being sodomized (more than once) by the Pharaoh. These events are punctuated by various hexes and incantations, long processions to one temple or another, descriptions of statues and animals and peasants and eunuchs (many eunuchs) and life in the seraglio and the smell of different perfumes and incenses and precious stones and robes and linens.

But most of all, Menenhetet's tells about sex. He was quite a stud in his time, and in the course of 700 pages we are trusted to perhaps 300 episodes of sex. Not just garden variety copulation either. The works. Even when he's a ghost he has sex. This may be indicative of life in ancient Egypt; certainly a look at the statuary of the time shows as much of an interest in sex and fertility as there was in any other historical period. Here, however, it makes for one very boring book. Certainly, there are moments when you might raise an eyebrow or two, like when Menenhetet decides he wants to make it with the Queen Nefertirl:

My life was before me, I felt. Whatever of it was left, was at last before me. I would not die in the grinding exasperation of the aged turned to stone by their fear of the stone that will lie on them, no I would find Nefertiri and I would fuck Her. The thought of my cock in Her, my agony in Her honey, my fatigue in Her wealth, my pride in Her royal privacy, my beating heart in Her sweet quiver, my peasant meet in the sauce of a Queen, my sword in Usermare's [the Pharsolt's] skin!--every high and low passion I ever felt came together, and my life was simple. I would fuck Her or die in the attempt...

You should see what actually happens? Have I told enough? Am I done yet? Please?

IF THIS SEEMS short shrift for a major novel by one of America's foremost writers, well, it is. The book: as you might have guessed by now, is painfully bad. The writing tries to mimic the Biblical cadence which translators often give to old, mythic stories and hence seems gimmicky, especially with Mailer's consuming interest in sex and scatology (an important episode in the book comes when Menenhetet steals some of the Pharaoh's feces, I swear). But even more annoying than the problems in execution, the concerns of the book, and its vacillation between comic book heroism and pornography is the simple fact that the book seems utterly irrelevant. I don't know if anything worse can be said about a serious book, but Ancient Evenings tells us nothing new or pertinent about Egypt or America or anything else. Nor does it make any statement about the imagination or literature which it makes noises about doing. It is one long, incredibly ornate doodle on a piece of scratch paper.

This irrelevancy is itself somewhat interesting when one considers Mailer's career. I can only guess that after Mailer's powerful and fruitful engagement in public affairs in the '50s and '60s, the much discussed stagnation of the '70s finally filled him with boredom, a boredom with society that festered even as he wrote the Marilyn Monroe books and The Executioner's Song. A desire to get the heavyweight crown for imagination was probably not the only thing that drove him to Egypt. Disaffection and disgust could well have had a lot to do with it. Mailer may have imagination, despite this disaster, for a big book. He certainly has talents in abundance which could be put to more useful service. One can only hope he will come home to use them.