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On God

His mysterious ways

Norman Mailer
Continuum, 221pp, £16.99,

Roger Lewis

Wednesday, 26th March 2008

Norman Mail takes on God, and Roger Lewis reviews the result

God, Mailer insists knowledgeably, categorically doesn’t like church. Sundays must be so boring, if Mailer’s own experience was anything to go by. ‘I might just as well have been a shell on the surf’s edge,’ he says. Prayer is another total waste of time. ‘I don’t think God listens to prayer.’ Particularly off-putting to the Deity is the posture of Muslims — ‘Kneel down, present your buttocks to the sky, and recognise you are totally weak before the wrath of God.’

Anything suggesting weakness gets Mailer’s thumbs-down. Love and charity, for example, he’s not keen on, because the people who go in for such wishy-washy things are often ‘timid and cowardly … Cowardice is a poison.’ Mailer himself was married about a dozen times and attacked one of his wives with a potato knife, so he’ll know what he’s talking about for once. He is also worried about the morality of plastic. ‘It seems to me,’ he says, ‘that plastic is a perfect weapon in the Devil’s armoury, for it desensitises human beings.’ That’s a new one — that we should be frightened of our Formica work-surfaces. But Mailer is certain of it. When women started having plastic around the home, this was ‘the point when the ballgame was lost’. The same goes for flush toilets. ‘The flush toilet was a rarity before 1900,’ and mankind was the better for it — more interestingly connected to the reality of earth and mud, or something. Clearly the producers of I’m A Celebrity — Get Me Out Of Here missed a trick. Norman Mailer would have adored being in the jungle, slopping out with pop babes on the wane.

If plastic and lavatories are inert, ‘an inkling of non-existence,’ Mailer’s conception of Heaven is that it will be sheer Hell. It is a place renowned for its antiseptic ‘boredom, repetition, and slowness,’ a celestial bureau- cracy run by monitoring angels who are as grey and translucent as tax inspectors. Luckily, he doesn’t intend hanging about there long, for Mailer deems reincarnation to be a scientific fact. After a brief spell in Purgatory, which he describes as a ‘set of many unhappy holding tanks,’ he’ll be right back either as a black athlete or ‘the fastest cockroach on the block’.

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