His mysterious ways

Norman Mailer spent his life hunting for a subject big enough to suit or satisfy his titanic ego. The post- humous On God suggests he finally hit the spot. The Almighty is made to come across as an embattled novelist — as a version of Norman Mailer himself in fact — ‘a mighty source of creative energy,’ whose most developed works are human beings, though ‘think of the excitement of God when the dinosaur came into being’. Yes indeed — the mighty brontosaurus can readily be seen as Mailer’s evolutionary ancestor. Earlier in his career, however, God wasn’t quite so competent and went through a long apprentice phase marred by failures — fish ‘with hideous eyes’ and ‘worm life, frog life, vermin life’. As for insects, these must surely be the Devil’s contribution. In Mailer’s view of Creation, ‘the Devil was meddling in it from the commencement’.