Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Norman Mailer's bestseller, Harlot's Ghost, opens with the narrator, Harry Hubbard, describing his surroundings in Maine. Above the first chapter are the words Omega 1, which refer to a secret autobiographical manuscript that Harry had begun years before (9). When the book begins, Harry is living with his wife, Kittredge, at a place they call the Keep (5). The Keep once belonged to Harry's father, Cal Hubbard, who sold it to his second cousin, Rodman Knowles Gardiner (7). Ironically, Rodman Gardiner is Kittredge's father, and Kittredge gained possession of the Keep on her first marriage (7).
The novel begins innocently enough, with Harry describing his wife's eyes as having "the blue of the sea" and saying that her white skin becomes "luminous in any pale meadow" (5). Although Harry and Kittredge have no children, they are somewhat distracted by the ringing of bells from chapels with no bells; according to Harry, the Keep has a ghost, Augustus Farr (7-8).
The author does not take long to thicken the plot . Before long the narrator reveals that Kittredge is Harry's third cousin, that both Harry and his father worked in the CIA and spent three years trying to kill Castro, and that Harry had -saved his wife from suicide (11-13). Kittredge Montague-Hubbard is a Radcliffe graduate who seems to have an affinity for intrigue, since her first husband, Hugh Tremont Montague (otherwise known as Harlot, and by Kittredge, affectionately, as Gobby), was also employed by the CIA (13-14). But one begins to wonder about Montague's character when Harry hints at why Kittredge asked Montague for a divorce; it seems that Montague led their 16-year-old son to a tall cliff and . . . Montague survived but the son did not (13-15). Kittredge's second husband, Harry, does not appear to be perfect either. After all, Harry has a mistress named Chloe (16).
Then, when Montague's purported body (with most of its he...