That essay—perfectly executed—comprises the first part of Ms. Homes’ new book. If you missed it the first time around, here’s a chance to catch up. I wish I could say that the rest of the book adds to the experience. Unfortunately, The Mistress’s Daughter bears all the symptoms of a nasty plague in publishing: It’s a book that began as an essay and should have remained an essay. There’s no reason to dress it up as something it isn’t.

The original essay is as suspenseful and deft as one of Ms. Homes’ short stories. (She’s a novelist, too, but short stories are her strength.) We meet Ellen Ballman and Norman Hecht—the biological parents who gave her away as a newborn—and are as horrified and brokenhearted for Ms. Homes as one can be for a stranger. Ellen never grew up; she’s as innocent and needy as she was at 22, when she gave birth. Ellen’s married lover, Norman, who was clearly captivated with her—and seems to be haunted by her still after 30-odd years—reveals himself to be a weak, cold man who refuses to see that he’s either one. Norman insists on meeting his daughter in hotels (a move with sexual overtones that would never—and do not—go unnoticed by a writer like Ms. Homes), and later, after asking her to take a DNA test to prove his paternity (which she does perfectly willingly), all but vanishes from her life.

Much of the story is told in dialogue—conversations with her mother (“You should adopt me and take care of me,” Ellen says) and her father (who stiffly ends every conversation with the blow-off, WASP-y phrase, “Fine thing”). Dialogue, both perfectly natural and refreshingly crisp, has always been Ms. Homes’ great skill, her preferred method of exposing her characters’ inner life.

THE SECOND, LONGER PART OF THE BOOK is sluggish and contrived. Ms. Homes all but abandons the ruthless investigation of her feelings about her parents (all four of them) and heads for far less compelling terrain: her extended genealogy. It’s a tale of immigrants and brothers and sisters and farms, with mixed-up last names and microfiches. (O.K., that’s an exaggeration, but there are a lot of dusty file cabinets here.) At the very end is a sweet tribute to her adoptive grandmother, who’s like a wise, seen-it-all character from a Doris Lessing novel. She died at 99, and Ms. Homes writes as if the pain and confusion of being adopted were made up for by the privilege of having known this great woman.

The Mistress’s Daughter is a brave book, despite its failings—one that will be devoured by other adoptees and their families, not to mention memoir-guzzlers. The first part is a must-read for any fan of Ms. Homes’ fiction. Although her work doesn’t tend to be autobiographical, learning a bit about her roots helps shed light on some of her imaginative choices. Here, for example, she emphasizes how much she and her father resemble each other, and how eerie it is for both of them. In The Safety of Objects, a young man kidnaps a young, tomboyish girl and begs her to behave like a boy, like his dead brother, Sam. The resemblance between the girl and his brother is almost unbearable for him.

A.M. Homes hasn’t had the easiest life, but we can be grateful for the strange and original body of work it has produced. (Her fiction, that is.)

Hillary Frey edits the culture pages of The Observer.

In particular, he'll be releasing a "formal ethics opinion" on Spitzer's service on the board of his family's charitable trust.

It does raise the interesting question about who gets to regulates the state official in charge of regulating charities.

As a political issue, though, it would be surprising if Spitzer's family money proves to be any more resonant now than it was in 1998, the year his opponents accused him of buying the primary by showering dollars on Clarence Norman and other party officials in exchange for support.

-- Josh Benson

-Matthew Schuerman

UPDATE: Here's the letter (PDF).

That’s news—assuming that “first-time homeowners” would be low- or middle-income families. In the agreement signed last May, Ratner and ACORN said only that they would “work on a program to develop affordable for-sale units, which are intended to be in the range of 600 to 1,000 units.”

Sounds like things are firming up. ACORN spokesman Jonathan Rosen told us today: “We feel good that we have locked in 50-50 affordable in rentals and that we are on track to do 600 to 1,000 affordable ownership units on or off site and more likely a combination of the two.”

Let’s say ACORN gets 600 affordable condos on the site itself, on top of the 2,250 affordable rental units that are clearly promised in the agreement. In the grand scheme of things, we don’t think that 2,850 affordable apartments have been built in one spot in this city since 1976. That was Starrett City—which is so far out it can hardly be considered New York.

Out of the 7,300 condos and rentals now anticipated for the site itself, that means almost 40 percent will be affordable, which is what Schaefer Landing is doing on the Williamsburg waterfront (40 percent low-income rentals, 60 percent luxury condos). Rosen for one said that the 7,300 number will likely fall during the state review process, while the affordable number will stay relatively level. Still, if this development works out to any wee bit less than 50 percent affordable, we will never hear the end of it, because proponents have often used that number to tout the project. Even as recently as last night, ACORN Executive Director Bertha Lewis told reporters, "If this project happens in whatever way the state and the city decide it’s going to happen, it’s 50-50 baby. That’s all we know. I don’t care what configuration it’s in. It’s 50-50. That’s the story."

Ratner is getting a lot of financial help on this one, but just today we ran a story about developers who get no or reduced taxes for building 100 percent luxury condos. (We always come around to talking about ourselves in the end.)

-Matthew Schuerman

"Why had Norman's candidacy clearly rallied the city's power elite into action? Perhaps because as the Post had said in its earlier editorial, Norman would be 'more focused on principles than practicalities'—a threatening perspective to those in power..."

He also claims that Hank Sheinkopf (Shein-cough?) coughed on him. Wetly.

This was supposed to be the hot one for summer. Big stars (Harrison Ford, Michelle Pfeiffer). Major big-time director (Robert Zemeckis). A plot so top-secret that even Ms. Pfeiffer, on the talk-show circuit, confessed she didn't know the ending. One screening for critics–and if you were absent, forever hold your peace. Well, Dreamworks' allegedly hair-raising suspense thriller in the Alfred Hitchcock tradition, What Lies Beneath, has at last been unveiled, amidst the kind of secrecy that used to accompany book signings by Salman Rushdie. It is awful.

I am still pledged to secrecy about the plot, which seems to have been made up each day on the set, but if I call it Gaslight meets Psycho , do you get the picture? Harrison Ford even plays a character named Norman. Duh. He's a scientist doing genetics research. Ms. Pfeiffer, luscious as ever, gamely plays his wife Claire, who has abandoned her own career as a cellist to follow him to a secluded country house on a lake in Vermont. The house plays the Bates Motel. The lake (and what lies beneath it) seems to be the one that drove Annette Bening into the loony bin in another incomprehensible Dreamworks disaster, In Dreams . Ms. Pfeiffer even has the same nightmares. Winds shake the house. The same picture frame crashes to the floor in splinters. Apparitions appear in the mirrors. Doors open at will. Sparks fly from the hair dryer. The bathtub fills with water in the middle of the night.

When the neighbor's wife disappears, Norman jokes it away ("Maybe she was abducted by aliens") and the audience, which is always smarter than the filmmakers, collectively sighs "Aha!" We've learned never to trust a wisecracking husband who makes his wife think she's going nuts when the lights go out. But when the domestic mystery next door is quickly solved and dismissed as a red herring, the creepy stuff goes on and the movie turns into a ghost story.

Sleuthing on her own time, Claire discovers the house is haunted by a former student who had an affair with Norman, then committed suicide. Once the ghost is identified, and its motivations (revenge, natch) revealed, there's only one step left–exorcism! But director Zemeckis, weaned on old Hitchcock scripts, isn't finished with us yet. Things get eerier when the dead girl's spirit takes over Claire's body with the help of a Ouija board from Kmart, and Norman faces a thorny dilemma: how to get rid of the ghost without killing his own wife!

The tedium with which this all unfolds would force Hitch to order a complete script overhaul, but the deluded people involved in What Lies Beneath are oblivious to annoyances like unconvincing narrative, terrible dialogue and labyrinthine implausibility. Once the comely ghost has been identified and exorcised, we think we're through with her, but she keeps coming back for more havoc. After the ghost is gone, there's one gory shock after another, with a finale so messy it looks tacked on as an afterthought in post-edit.

By the time What Lies Beneath piles on most of the horror-flick contrivances and all of the clichés (including no fewer than three separate bathtub scenes right out of Diabolique ), everything seems borrowed and pasted together from better movies in the genre. The script, a first-time writing gig by an actor named Clark Gregg, is a predictable job of connect the dots. The music is road-company Bernard Herrmann. The direction is such a far cry from the edgy, offbeat, risk-taking stuff we've come to expect from the director of Forrest Gump that the audience already knows to shout "Don't touch that cell phone!" as Ms. Pfeiffer reaches into the pocket of a dead body that is anything but.

Ms. Pfeiffer goes through the most illogical motions with the dedicated sobriety of an actress who desperately needs a good picture and knows this is not the right one, while Mr. Ford tackles the kind of emotionally charged role he's usually careful to avoid (for good reason), with goofy results. Although he shows more animation than he did in the insufferable Random Hearts , he still appears nervous and detached in the love scenes, and the biggest scare in What Lies Beneath is what's happened to his face. Unlike Redford and Newman, he is not aging gracefully. Craggy is good, but once his brows furrow and his eyes start rolling, he's as spooked out as Tony Perkins in Psycho , and he looks held together by grout.

The biggest lesson to be learned from this $80 million fiasco is that you can't promise a fresh slant on Hitchcock and have a character named Norman at the same time.

Give This Man a Real Budget

For charm and originality, look no further than Chuck and Buck , another strikingly offbeat portrait of a peculiar but lovable misfit from Miguel Arteta, the gifted young director of Star Maps . This dark comedy exposes the ambiguities of male friendship and the awkward pull between obligation and self-preservation in such a compelling way that you cannot fail to be moved by its sweetness and ingenuity. It is several feel-good notches above the usual gay-themed movies we've been getting lately, and its compassion, understanding and affection for needy people of all persuasions strikes a universal chord.

Mike White, who has been winning prizes on the film-festival circuit for his sensitive, emotionally affecting screenplay, also plays the leading role–a 27-year-old named Buck who has been obsessed with his childhood friend Charlie (whom he nicknames Chuck) throughout adolescence and young adulthood. Chuck (honestly and engagingly played by Chris Weitz, the producer of American Pie ) once had a sexual romp with Buck when they were kids, but he has since moved on to both a girlfriend and a career as a successful record executive in Hollywood, and he is anxious to put his past behind him.

When Buck invites Chuck to his mother's funeral, they meet after many years of separation, and Buck's pubescent infatuation grows stronger. He packs up his station wagon, follows his lifelong love to Los Angeles, sets up house in a motel room and actually begins stalking Chuck (albeit with the nicest intentions). Invading his old friend's life, this pathetic nerd gets a cruel rejection and, in a humiliated state of depression, turns their story into a children's play. Sucking lollipops and playing with his collection of cars made of matchboxes, Buck is a tragic figure of loneliness, while Chuck's embarrassment is understandable. But they have much more to reveal and discover before it's over, and as the film's tender trajectory forces them to push forward in their lives, reconciling the children they once were with the grown men they must learn to be, Chuck and Buck winds its way into the viewer's own heart without a trace of sentimentality.

I don't know if Mike White is a skilled actor or not (he is certainly a marvelous writer of situations and dialogue), but he does such an expert job of moving you into the alienated time warp of a profoundly eccentric individual that he makes you forget you're watching a movie. You literally feel you know all about Buck and his bizarrely funny world and you are grateful to spend quality time with him, no questions asked.

The entire cast is superb, but there's one sensational performance worthy of special praise, by Lupe Ontiveros, a Latina actress who has toiled in hundreds of maid's roles in Hollywood films without achieving the fame and applause she deserves. Her own status as a frustrated Hollywood outsider provides a special insight into Buck's world, and as the crafty but kind director of Buck's play whose maternal interest helps him shape his future, she literally steals the picture, making the kind of impact Fernanda Montenegro made in Central Station .

The overwhelming vulnerability in Chuck and Buck reaches out on several levels, and the young but immensely talented Mr. Arteta captures it triumphantly, shooting every frame digitally to save money. There's no telling what this guy could achieve with first-rate camera equipment and a real budget, and it's high time somebody gave him a chance to try.

Caruso and Stritch: Boys' Night Out

Best friends for almost as many years as it took Ann Miller to admit she was finally old enough to vote, Jim Caruso and Billy Stritch are two guys from Texas who are pooling their considerable talents every Monday night in July at Arci's Place (450 Park Avenue South) for the summer's friskiest and most enchanting cabaret act. Of all the clubs in New York, by the way, Arci's has the best food, friendliest service and most reasonable prices. Just thought you should know. You leave royally fed and, with Caruso and Stritch sharing the bill, doubly entertained.

From Mr. Caruso, expect humor, sass and surprises: Kay Thompson's finger-snapping arrangement of "How Deep is the Ocean," a great Johnny Mercer medley, a takeoff on Vernon Duke's "Autumn in New York" called "Summer in New York" (with all the humidity and horror the title implies), and a deeply touching ballad arrangement of the Scarecrow's "If I Only Had a Brain" from The Wizard of Oz . From Mr. Stritch, expect imaginative piano riffs and brilliant jazz chords on arrangements that sizzle: a combo of "Fascinating Rhythm" and "Crazy Rhythm" that flies off the keyboard and bounces off the wall.

This is the only act in the world that features a collaboration between Brazil's Antonio Carlos Jobim and Broadway's Fred Ebb, turning "The Girl From Ipanema" into "The Boy From Fire Island" ("In his hand a dry martini / And on his rump a wet bikini" … you get the picture). For Mr. Stritch on his own, pick up a copy of his new CD, recorded live at the Jazz Standard by After 9/Sin-Drome Records and featuring the ultimate in what he calls "ballad noir," a creamy-dreamy rendition of Mel Tormé's classic, "Born to be Blue." For double pleasure, catch Caruso & Stritch in an unbeatable act of jazz, pop, comedy and conversation that is different from anything else in town. They are two of the very few people around to whom you can genuinely apply the word "insouciant" without blushing.

Stormin' Norman now walks with two canes. In any other 76-year-old, this might be taken as a sign of old age, testament to the ravages of arthritis; in Norman Mailer, it looks more like the spirit of willful contradiction. He was a Brooklyn Heights ornament, a cannonball of pure urbanism, twice candidate for mayor (in 1961 and in 1969); now he lives in Provincetown, Mass., a country squire in a big house on the water. Still–he could turn the page quick as that. The grizzled patriarch, the proudly priapic prisoner of sex, could come charging back into town, agitating–who knows?–for gynecocracy: a new Mailer for a new millennium.

And what's on Aquarius' mind lately? Back in January of this year, according to Mary V. Dearborn's new biography, Mr. Mailer told Manhattan File that Mayor Giuliani "made it his business to give us a city where the streets would be safer. He would relieve us of this sense of the poor encroaching on us. After all, what if the poor decide to become violent? Whereas, if we don't see them, we're reminded less of them … People want to be able to go to sleep at night without feeling guilty. Every time a beggar approaches you, if you give him money, you can never know for certain if the act derives from the goodness of your heart or you are just slightly afraid of him. Giuliani delivered us from much of that." (That retrograde ramble from a man who 51 years ago campaigned for Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party.)

But, lately, Mr. Mailer's opinion of the mayor has plummeted. He told The Observer on Nov. 29, "I think the war between Giuliani and the Brooklyn Museum may be described as the fracas between the swamp flies and the scumbags." But if he were registered in New York–he says he's not–how would he cast his ballot in the Senate race?

"I might not vote," he said, then relented: "I'm a lifetime Democrat, so there might be a sludgy movement of my feet toward Hillary, but no enthusiasm." Here's his beef against the first lady: "Like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Al Gore and Maggie Thatcher, Hillary has one overbearing flaw–she is full of cant. She always says what is most immediately useful politically to say."

As for Mr. Mailer, he'll say almost anything: "With Norman Mailer you expect the unexpected," Ms. Dearborn told The Observer , accepting the notion that the subject of her unauthorized biography may in years to come behave in ways that mock her conclusions. "I have no secret information about how he's going to conduct himself for the rest of his life," she admitted cheerfully.

"He's had a kind of lackluster decade, but he's capable of a comeback; he's done it before, spectacularly, around 1960, with Advertisements for Myself ." Ms. Dearborn added, "His mind is 100 percent there."

Though they hate to admit it, longevity is the bane of biographers who choose a living subject. A decade ago, when he started his life of Saul Bellow (born 1915), James Atlas would have had the actuaries on his side, the law of averages nudging toward the grave the author of Seize the Day and More Die of Heartbreak . But the Nobel laureate (a kind of anti-Mailer whose staunchly conservative convictions perdure) is clinging stubbornly to life: Mr. Bellow has a new novel in the works, and his fifth wife is about to give birth to his fourth child. Mr. Atlas, eager to document the latest developments, has postponed publication until fall 2000.

For Ms. Dearborn, whose biography of Henry Miller appeared in 1991, when the author of Tropic of Cancer had been dead a decade, live subjects are the way of the future. "The old way of doing biography is changing," she said. Technological advances and changes in modes of communication mean that writers are less likely to leave a clear paper trail. In the future, sifting through archives may be less important than gaining access to living friends and family. The biographer's role will be, as Ms. Dearborn put it, "to download the minds of everybody who knew the subject."

Gather news of the screws–then wait? "In the best of all possible worlds," Ms. Dearborn admitted, "I guess you'd put it away until he died." But obvious practical considerations force the biographer's hand: "I have to make a living," she pointed out.

In one respect, Ms. Dearborn is banking on a sea change. The tide of literary opinion has been running against Mr. Mailer lately. The lowest low came two years ago with the publication of The Gospel According to the Son , which spawned a legion of humiliating reviews.

But Ms. Dearborn, who has a Ph.D. in American literature from Columbia University, thinks Mr. Mailer's reputation will rebound. "He's a writer who's going to be known for the body of his work rather than particular books. With Ernest Hemingway, he's one of two writers who define the century, and I give Ernest the first half and Norman the second." His public stature adds weight to his writing. "Whether or not we like it, he has spoken for Americans and shaped what's happened to us–though that was more apparent in the 60's and 70's than it is now."

Ms. Dearborn can be sharply critical of the man whose life and work she spent five years studying. For example, she told The Observer , "when I saw Norman deciding that the C.I.A. was a force for the good in our society, after he'd been so vocal and effective in the 70's criticizing the C.I.A.–that got me riled." She was also appalled to uncover Mr. Mailer's embarrassing entanglement with Senator Joe McCarthy's former chief counsel, Roy Cohn–a relationship, she notes in her biography, that Mr. Mailer "would strive to keep … hidden at all costs." According to Ms. Dearborn, Cohn got Mr. Mailer together with his old friend S.I. (Si) Newhouse Jr. Cohn "facilitated" deals that landed Mr. Mailer massive book contracts and lucrative gigs writing for magazines; thanks to Cohn, Mr. Newhouse, through his company, Advance Publications, helped pay for that big house in Provincetown–in return, Mr. Mailer rented out the guest house to Cohn.

Waving aside failures of judgment and vexing inconsistencies, Ms. Dearborn reminded The Observer that Norman Mailer "is a very attractive guy–the blue eyes are as piercing as Paul Newman's ever were." She is indulgent about his waffling; his praise of Mayor Giuliani, for example, she dismissed as "laziness"–"that's a harsh word," she acknowledged, "but Norman's living a very comfortable and settled life. I'm not sure the comment is an indication of where he stands politically."

Is Donald Trump for President a farcical replay of Norman Mailer for mayor? Mr. Trump's wacky, squirm-inducing candor is a fun house echo of Norman on the hustings three decades ago. Ms. Dearborn guessed that Mr. Mailer "would love the idea of Trump running for office. He'd admire his more outrageous statements. They're signs of life. Norman's always believed that the most important thing is for politicians to have imagination."

Candidate Mailer had plenty of that. He hoped to forge what he called "a hip coalition of left and right." His 1969 platform proposed, among other things: statehood for the city; a ban on private automobiles in Manhattan; legalization of gambling; provision of free bicycles in city parks; and the establishment of "Sweet Sunday"–one day a month without electricity, all traffic stopped, all comings and goings, by plane or train or boat, halted.

Thirty years later, you can only hope that Norman Mailer hasn't frozen himself into some everlasting Sweet Sunday. That would deny Stormin' Norman, and New York, his shot at a 21st-century comeback.

– Adam Begley

Mailer: A New Biography Captures This Vexing Creature

There is an advertisement currently doing the rounds for an on-line encyclopedia, which is using a dictator-size photograph of Norman Mailer to help sell itself. Looking gently wounded, his fine eyes focused on a suitably menacing abstraction, the celebrated writer is seen polishing his spectacles, as if preparing for serious thought. But there is no daintiness or effeminacy, of course: His denim shirt is filled like a sail with his strong belly and is open at the neck to reveal a vigorous little copse of chest hair. His cherubic lips are set in a macho moue . To the side are the words: "Norman Mailer wonders if cloning will delight the devil and offend God or offend the devil and delight God … go to genetics, ethics … at britannica.com."

Mr. Mailer has always had a weakness for vulgar Manicheanism, but never has that interest seemed less earned than in this advertisement. The flippancy of the context somehow guarantees the flippancy of the opposition; the theological language is meaningless. The very idea that anyone could formulate so easily such alternatives suggests that they are not real alternatives; the sweat of dilemma has been glibly washed away by money. What poses as either-or is nothing of the kind, but merely both-and, with a guilty conscience.

Mr. Mailer last announced an interest in matters theological two years ago, when he published The Gospel According to the Son , and told an interviewer, "I'm one of the 50 or 100 novelists in the world who could rewrite the New Testament." He went on to say that he could identify with Christ: "I have a slight understanding of what it's like to be half a man and half something else, something larger. Believe it if you will, but I mean this modestly. Every man has a different kind of life, and mine had a peculiar turn. It changed completely at 25 when The Naked and the Dead came out. Obviously, a celebrity is a long, long, long, long way from the celestial, but nonetheless it does mean that you have two personalities you live with all the time."

So this "half a man and half something else"–what is this but a kind of celebrity centaur?–is still messily with us, still daring or, as he would melodramatically have it, still "risking" nonsense and nonsensical utterances. Mr. Mailer has been unavoidable for 50 years; he is like the man who insists on cutting his nails in Rousseau's presence, as in The Confessions . He has still a digit or two to go. Which is why Mary V. Dearborn's excellent and exhaustive biography Mailer: A Biography (Houghton Mifflin, 478 pages, $30) is so welcome, for it offers the shapeliest and most efficient tour yet of Mr. Mailer's antics, taking us smartly and irreverently through the crowded Mailer decades–the fazed 50's, the savage 60's, the sour 70's, the easy 80's and the null 90's.

Ms. Dearborn treads rather lightly on the work, and is sometimes not hard enough on Mr. Mailer's trash, and other times not appreciative enough of his finest writing. She has apparently read all of Mr. Mailer's work, for which she should be beatified, but she does not seem to think her readers are very interested in it. Yet the attention she pays to Mr. Mailer's public and performing selves–those dolphins of delirium–is always intelligent and sharply focused, and frequently astringent. In its way, her book is exemplary and should give no comfort to its subject.

Like Mr. Mailer, Ms. Dearborn is mindful of the shadow cast over his life by the early success of his great novel, The Naked and the Dead . This was when a shaken Norman Mailer was handed his first cup of celebrity, and instantly began to spill from it. He was in his mid-20's, and his novel was at the top of the best seller lists. His first royalty check was for $40,000. It is often implied that this youthful exposure disturbed Mr. Mailer's balance and gave him an unquenchable thirst for attention. More prosaically, and more damagingly, it was money and readers–lots of both–that would become Mr. Mailer's twin goals, and it was this race for reward that would consign Mr. Mailer's novelistic work to the less-than-great, to the commercial, the vulgar, the blowsy.

Famously, Mr. Mailer tried, in the 1950's, to revisit the garden of his first success, and failed–disastrously, with Barbary Shore , and modestly, with The Deer Park . Throughout the 1960's and 70's, he would talk about "the big novel" he had inside him, the one that would narrate the entire American experience; in 1974, Little, Brown parted with a million dollars as fuel for this hugeness. (Anyone remember Ancient Evenings ?) But to look again at the early fiction is to be both impressed and corrected. At his best, Mr. Mailer gives us the sense that he has listened to a big, bleeding tranche of American life, and listened above all with quivering sensitivity to the way certain Americans speak: "Brother, I can tell you, once you've been bed-wise with high-class pussy, it makes you ill, it makes you physically ill to take less than the best." Mr. Mailer is a fine psychologist of power in those early works; his fascists and pimps and commanders talk like power, but in reality the corridors of power are honeycombs of insecurity and are about to collapse into their own waxy vacuums.

Yet one notices all that Mr. Mailer cannot do as a novelist. His grotesques, with their sour mental prosperity, are vivid enough, but never quite alive: There is not in all of Mailer the successful fictional portrait of a busy consciousness. Not being alive, his characters exist with one another but rarely live through each other, that crucial test of a novelist's electrical currents. The early novels have a certain bold, klaxoning power; but they lack the sensitivity, the fine precision, the lyrical delicacy that makes the truly artistic. Indeed, there is a sense in which Mr. Mailer–who has never been very interested in the esthetics of the novel, who has been content with sturdy, hand-me-down mid-century realism–is not literary in the highest sense. Reading The Deer Park recently, I decided that the tone and prose of the book were commercial rather than literary; it was Raymond Chandler rather than Ernest Hemingway. Listen: "My father left me a bum's inheritance; underneath his drunks and his last disappointed jobs and his shy hello for me, in all those boardinghouse rooms where he watched the wallpaper curl and the years go down in one hash-house after another, he kept his little idea. There was something special about him, he had always thought, someday, somewhere …"

Perhaps it is no surprise that Mr. Mailer began to drift away from the novel after writing The Deer Park , which was a kind of brilliant journalistic portrait of the Hollywood scene rather than a great novel. Journalism provided the right gladiatorial sand for Mr. Mailer to kick up. Journalism was the true medium for a writer possessed of a fabulous prose style but with essentially static powers of description, for journalism proceeds statically, paragraph by glittering paragraph, in a starry shuffle. It is not a dance, but a continually interrupted performance, and this was, and always has been, Mr. Mailer's real mode–short flights and circular flights, as T.S. Eliot once said of Matthew Arnold's essays.

And what circularity! Excepting the great journalistic triumphs– The Armies of the Night and the first few hundred pages of The Executioner's Song –has any major writer in the history of literature, any writer who writes as well as Mr. Mailer does, produced so much intellectual effluvia? There is no idea so fine that Mr. Mailer cannot violate it. What one holds against him is not that he was sometimes wrong, like anyone, but his proud commitment to incoherence and irrationality, which seems an inversion of the writer's proper task, as if a doctor were found giving cocaine to his patients.

Of course, a certain amount of Mr. Mailer's literary production in the 1950's was undertaken in a fever of drugs (and after that, drink took over). Ms. Dearborn is at her best when snapping us through some of the intoxicated outrageousness of these years: Mr. Mailer denouncing Waiting for Godot in his Village Voice column before seeing the play (and then, with appealing and characteristic honesty, admitting to his mistake once he had seen and liked the play); Mr. Mailerstabbinghiswife, Adele, at a party in 1960, afterparanoically dividing the room into those for and those against him; Mr. Mailer running for Mayor of New York in 1969, and drunkenlyattackinghisownsupporters–"Fuck you"–as a bunch of "spoiled pigs"; Mr. Mailer and Germaine Greer at the Town Hall "debate," in which he praised his own essay, "ThePrisonerofSex,"as"probably the most important single intellectual event of the last four years"; Mr. Mailer and the "literary" murderer, Jack Henry Abbott (a promising writer), who was released from prison in 1981 and then swiftly murdered someone, prompting Mr. Mailer to defend him with the infamous phrase, "Culture is worth a little risk" (a characteristic irrationality: not that culture, and not that risk). And on and on, the adventures and trips and scandals and shamelessness and affairs somehow bleeding into each other into one great, wounding, arterial gush.

Sex is at the center of Mr. Mailer's "philosophy," and, appropriately, and in proper measure, Mary Dearborn is both gossipy about, and analytical of, his sexual entanglements. We read of various "threesomes," of Mr. Mailer's failed one-night stand with Gloria Steinem (he kept on asking, so she said Yes, but the event fizzled, by her account), and of how Mr. Mailer first consummated a long-term affair "in Bungalow Five at the Bel Air Hotel." (No one could accuse Ms. Dearborn of what Mr. Mailer once called "bringing a trombone to the boudoir"; she has brought binoculars, surveillance equipment and lots of yellow legal pads.)

More vulnerable is Mr. Mailer's intellectual involvement with sex. In his essay "The White Negro," and in that shocking novel An American Dream , the orgasm–or rather, the good orgasm–is promoted as the royal road to the palaces of liberated consciousness. The "hipster," or white Negro, encourages "the psychopath in oneself" and obeys only "the rebellious imperatives of the self." What defines this self, writes Mr. Mailer, is an "inner unconscious life" which various writers have called "energy," "life" and "sex," and which D.H. Lawrence called "blood."

For Mr. Mailer, this force is "the paradise of limitless energy and perception just beyond the next wave of the next orgasm." But his orgasm frenzy does not really resemble Lawrence's doctrine of blood. Mr. Mailer, one feels, is always trying to pack as much as possible into the sexual act; Lawrence radiated outward from the sexual act, searching humans for their "living flame," which was "the quick of life." And for Lawrence, this search was inseparable from a simultaneous search into the means of representing this living flame. For Lawrence, the question of sex was always at the same time the question of the novel. Mr. Mailer has never been interested enough in how one represents sex, which is (after the act itself) the most interesting thing about it.

Mr. Mailer's fabled "existentialism," which he waved gaudily in the 50's and 60's, and which he still revives from time to time, was really nothing more than sexistentialism. It was always the feeblest notion of freedom, and the vaguest idea of rebellion, and an insult both to his readers and to the true founders of existentialism, like Karl Jaspers and Albert Camus, who nobly fought for true metaphysical freedom, in terms and language whose clarity and devotion to rationality should have embarrassed Mr. Mailer into silence. Mr. Mailer's existentialism was an early version of "having it all." In a revealing passage in "The White Negro," he writes, "To be an existentialist, one must be able to feel oneself–one must know one's desires, one's rages, one's anguish, one must be aware of the character of one's frustration and know what would satisfy it."

Know what would satisfy it : This is the creed of Stephen Rojack, the hero of An American Dream . It is nothing more than the spoiled yearning of 1950's American individualism, the mothered little baby of teaty capitalism, its hands stretched out begging for more, more, more. Camus, one recalls, demanded the exact opposite of his existentialism–that it be a perpetual struggle, a never-ending dissatisfaction: "a continual rejection (which must not be confused with renunciation) and a continuous dissatisfaction (which must not be compared to immature unrest)," wrote Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus . Immature unrest, indeed!

Still, still … it is hard to dislike Mr. Mailer, even at the close of this acutely critical biography. His recklessness, his generosity, his mind always gloriously uninsured, despite its fooling–all this is oddly impressive and appealing. Mr. Mailer has always had the surest instinct for the rip tides of his age, and has swum with them, sometimes almost drowning in the process, sometimes, like Shakespeare's Antony, showing his back above the element he lived in. That his life has been a kind of archive of postwar American experience can be quickly proved by reference to Don DeLillo's Underworld , which, in recounting the major American neuroses, anxieties and events of the last 40 years, inadvertently recounts Mr. Mailer's: the bomb; paranoia; the C.I.A.; J. Edgar Hoover; Vietnam; graffiti (Mr. Mailer wrote a book about graffiti); standup comedy (Mr. Mailer as Lenny Bruce?); Jack Kennedy and the Zapruder film; Hollywood; Truman Capote's black-and-white ball (which Mr. DeLillo describes, omitting, however, that at it Mr. Mailer asked McGeorge Bundy to "step outside"); and, above all, New York. The sadness is that Mr. Mailer is not the author of Underworld , but only, as it were, a silent performer in it.

– James Wood