Though you’d think derision would be higher on the list, what Mailer most fears is soullessness. There is no need for the soul, however, in a modern world of technology, which has brought us traffic jams, atom bombs, and mood-disrupting drugs, plus the aforesaid plastic and water closets. By trying to improve upon nature, says Mailer, and impose ideological political systems upon free society, we have ended up with gulags. When the ‘power in the universe’ is a drive towards totalitarianism, again it is the Devil running amok. The ‘divine presence in existence’ has been suppressed.

I have to say, I almost prefer these mystical and transcendental burblings to the bleak, nihilistic, cold reason and rhetoric of Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens — though one look at any of these spud-faced people, Mailer included, is enough to disprove any theory of Intelligent Design. Well, Mailer will be up in the clouds, gassing now with his sizeable subject — unless he’s off cavorting with Marilyn Monroe, on whom he also wrote a nutty book; or was he manifested in that cockroach I just cheerfully stamped on? I hadn’t liked the look it kept giving me, frankly.

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