The Gospel according to the Son
“Not content to chronicle Jesus’ life in the form of an apocryphal gospel, Mailer has the chutzpah to crawl inside his title character’s head and tell the story from the first-person point of view. Here we get the Prince of Peace’s personal account of his temptation by Satan, his three-year ministry, and his agony on the cross. Mailer presents an entirely new kind of passion play, one that remains faithful to the shape of Jesus’ life as outlined in the gospels, while daring to imagine the inner life of this most elusive historical figure.”
Amazon.com, editorial review
Norman Mailer fused fact and fiction to create indelible portraits of such figures as Marilyn Monroe, Gary Gilmore, and Lee Harvey Oswald. In The Gospel According to the Son, Mailer reimagines, as no other modern author has, the key character of Western history. Here is Jesus Christ’s story in his own words: the discovery of his divinity and the painful, powerful journey to accepting and expressing it, “as if I were a man enclosing another man within.” In its brevity and piercing simplicity, it may be Mailer’s most accessible, direct, and heartfelt work.
Praise