Mailer’s Romance With The CIA

Harlot’s Ghost opens on a fog-ridden winter night in Maine, 1983, when the narrator, a CIA operative and Yale graduate named Herrick (Harry) Hubbard, is with fear in his heart driving along perilously icy roads to his mystery-shrouded home on Mount Desert Island. Although he can’t wait to meet up with his wife, Hadley Kittredge Gardiner Montague, a beautiful and inordinately brilliant psychologist for the CIA, it is not just the dark and icy roads that have filled him with fear and trembling this strange evening. He has just been heartily fornicating with his mistress, a waitress named Chloe, who provides plain bountiful satisfactions in bed but cannot possibly make up for his absence from his distinguished wife.

Kittredge, as she is known to her set, is so original in every sense that she frightens Harry rather more than he knows. And then there is the guilt. Kittredge’s first husband was Hugh Tremont Montague, a.k.a. Harlot, a legend in the CIA, the most d...