Here it is at last, more than a decade in the making,… Norman Mailer's long-awaited "Egyptian novel." For months the publishing trade press has hummed with reports of responses to the work, and the range of compliments already on file is striking. The most recent compliment came from Mailer's alma mater, Harvard; usually reserved in its relations with famous sons and daughters, the university put his photograph on the cover of its alumni magazine this spring and filled pages with an interview probing the meanings of "Ancient Evenings." Nobody doubts the newsworthiness of memoirs by government officials or biographies of film stars by their embittered children, but pre-publication interest in imaginative writing is invariably more limited. For a novel set in Egypt before the birth of Christ to rouse levels of excitement on the order of those inspired by "Ancient Evenings" is astonishing.

Not more astonishing, though, I...