[In Ancient Evenings] Mailer has gone back to the ancient evenings of the Egyptians in order to find the religious meaning of death, sex, and reincarnation….

[There is] spiritual power in Mailer's fantasy (it is not the historical novel that it masks itself as being) and there is a relevance to current reality in America that actually surpasses that of Mailer's largest previous achievement, The Executioner's Song. More than before, Mailer's fantasies, now brutal and unpleasant, catch the precise accents of psychic realities within and between us. Ancient Evenings rivals Gravity's Rainbow as an exercise in what has to be called a monumental sadoanarchism, and one aspect of Mailer's phantasmagoria may be its need to challenge Pynchon precisely where he is strongest. Paranoia, in both these American amalgams of Prometheus and Narcissus, becomes a climate….

Thomas Mann proudly remarked of his Egyptian novel, Joseph and His Brothers, that...