Whether the reader finds these forgivable faults or deal-breakers depends on their tolerance for Mailer’s elaborate prose and aureate musings on Public Morality, etc.

Oh, I could be angry right now, terribly angry, having just finished an almost 1300-page fictional tome that ends with the words "To Be Continued", but I choose not to be since I chose to hang in there with this book long after I had concluded that it would not reward in ways commensurate with its length. I had a throughly good time with a dictionary to look by etymologies for the obscure archaic American terms and wikipedia to read more about events. that, in a particularly harrowing scene, Dix tries, unsuccessfully but deeply affectingly, to rape or seduce the still virginal young man. Many of Mailer's later books appear to cover the similar themes, sexuality, mistrust/paranioa, betrayal, the nature of relationships and reality. It details the life of a CIA intelligence officer who has connections to the highest levels of the CIA.

His first posting is to Berlin, working under the crazed and earthy station chief Bill Harvey; Uruguay follows, where future Watergate burglar E. When he talks about his training at the Farm, he is unable to describe a class in lock-picking without comparing it to the physical act of love. code name is Harlot -- unusual, but then Hugh is altogether extraordinary -- where he lives with Kittredge and their young son, Christopher.

The author spends little time in filtering to what he really needed to say, and as a result, the book is at least twice as big as it should have been.

Norman Kingsley Mailer (January 31, 1923 – November 10, 2007) was an American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film-maker, actor and political activist. The house sits alone on an island, not ten acres of spread, just a stone’s throw—literally one long throw—off the western shore of Mount Desert. He tracks Hugh, it seems, to the Soviet Union and, I would guess, bests and supersedes him in the sequel. His journey to learn the secrets of his society—and his own past—takes him through the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the “momentous catastrophe” of the Kennedy assassination. The Berlin and Montevideo sections appear meaningless until the Kennedy and other big characters arrive post the halfway mark and the book takes on the Cuban chapters.