And Mailer’s experiences perhaps justify the apparent carelessness that frames The Spooky Art’s tone.

Toni Morrison perhaps cannot write for black men, Mailer judges, though qualifying his remark with the warning that he has only read “one or two” of Morrison’s novels, so his perspective may be skewed. In fact the entire section in which this note occurs, “A Lagniappe for the Reader,” assumes his audience will regard any peek into Mailer’s thought processes as a privilege.

Mailer’s experiences may also justify the prophetic authority he claims at the book’s end. The dust-jacket has a red, white and blue color scheme, and after a history of literature’s decline and fall in America—culminating in the judgment that with Camp’s advent, “literature had then failed”—he writes, “Nothing less than a fresh vision of the ongoing and conceivably climactic war between God and the Devil can slake our moral thirst now that we have passed through the incomprehensibilities of the last century.”

If his target is fellow writers, one wonders if Mailer has taken it upon himself to write a book of hope for the regeneration of our national literature after Sept. 11, which he mentions.

In any case, despite his disillusionment with the state of the novel, the book ends, literally, with exaltation.