Now a third twist has entered the picture. In the last couple of years the flying wedge of the post-Cold War cult of the dollar has reached Baja. With trade barriers down, luxury builders have moved in with their hotel and real estate money. Cabo wants to compete with the Mauis and St. Maartens of the world, to become the place upscale travelers go to get away.

When you visit, you sense these three Cabos rubbing up against each other continuously. I take them in reverse chronological order.

Cabo No. 3: My girlfriend and I live it up

Mexico is a land of nostalgia. That may be why the brand-new $30 million luxury resort Las Ventanas was built to look old. It has the look of a village on a beach. The copper urns that give the walkways visual texture could have been pulled off the set of “All the Pretty Horses.” The furniture is stone and handmade and beautiful. The vast rooms have jacuzzis whose faucets are green with patina. There are a lot of wrought-iron gates. Everything hums here, hiding a lot of hard work and careful planning.

Las Ventanas has four staff members for every guest. “The situation here is almost Indonesian,” Edward Steiner, the general manager, explained to me. He had managed Washington’s Watergate Hotel for years, and now he was teaching 250 people from an intimate culture how not to be. He had put the employees in sage and khaki uniforms, which the hotel took back to wash every night. A network of staff tunnels had been built underneath the public areas. Each week he posted a lesson on the walls. Shortly before we got there the lesson had been: “Own your perimeter.” Anything that happened within 10 feet of a staff member was his or hers to deal with. The lesson was already taking. Our towels were refolded each time we left the room.

Las Ventanas was enormously seductive. The sky was deep blue with puffy El Greco clouds. The water was light green, the cerulean swells marked by the splash of putty-colored pelicans. The cuisine was Mexican-Mediterranean, full of cilantro and tuna paillard. My girlfriend and I agreed this was the most relaxing place we’d ever been to, on a par with the womb. Better, in fact, because of that waveless pool. When you swam, the displaced water overflowed into a kind of outer moat, which recycled it silently into the main tank. Doing laps was as tranquil as reading. There was the sea, then the waveless pool, then the Texan women reading Vogue.

I took up a post on a stone barstool in the pool and started reading a book about travel writer Bruce Chatwin. Chatwin chucked his job and went to Patagonia in the middle of winter. He wanted to get away from dour England, but what kind of person went to Baja out of season? It was hot, if pleasant by the water. I asked, but most guests were not eager to talk.

You could talk to the staff though. They were young and educated. They came from everywhere but Baja: Mexico City, Guadalajara, Acapulco. Under Steiner they had developed the esprit of actors with day jobs. They seemed in the deepest sense un-Mexican, because they had a less brutal idea of what work had to be. My girlfriend had noted something else. One of the hotel’s drivers introduced her to a new word: Seqa. It was an alternative to Seqorita and Seqora: “Ms.” We were delighted. We started to try it out. The results weren’t promising. The women laughed. The male staff started hanging out by our bungalow.

I know luxury is something people go a good distance out of their way for, but although the resort was doing what it did wonderfully, for us it began to feel a bit weird. Being waited on is uncomfortable, especially being waited on by people you relate to so well. We began to subvert the group-think in small ways. We made our bed, putting the previous night’s gift of a ceramic starfish back on the covers. My girlfriend started keeping food in the room, so no one would have to walk down those long tunnels just to bring us breakfast rolls. The maids found it and threw it out, owning their perimeter. It was time to break out.

It was nearly nightfall, Saturday night, and tiny
Xapoteca children in Cabo’s tourist center shoved little
dolls and candy hearts at us. Men stood in plywood booths
shouting, “Information? Información? Auskunft?” They had
brochures for hotels, snorkel trips, charter boats, craft
stores. The college students were pouring in. What was here
for them? Why had they come? Perhaps because of the 10
restaurants in town with “shrimp” in their names: The
Drunken Shrimp, The Crazy Shrimp, The Happy Shrimp, Shrimp
Bowl and Shrimp Platter and Shrimp Factory, Shrimp
Connection and Shrimp Store and Shrimps ‘R’ Us and Shrimp-O-Rama. There is also a Planet Hollywood and a Hard Rock
Cafe. For this, and other things, the new Cabo makes no
apologies.
The students move through a well-insulated little
circuit of bars beginning with Cabo Wabo, then Cocomo, then
moving on to the Giggling Marlin and ending at Squid Roe,
which doesn’t close until 3 a.m. “What you see in Mexico
stays in Mexico,” one Squid Roe sign read. Port towns –
Provincetown, Key West — tend to make that promise. People
will do things they won’t do at home. House tequila slingers
climbed on tables, placed a greasy hat on a patron’s head
and forced them to down huge shots sprayed from a bota. The
girls on the dance floor looked ready to take their shirts
off. Money moved quickly. Pesos, dollars, credit cards. On
our way home, we passed groups of teenage American girls
trying to talk their way into Planet Hollywood. They were
turned away.

That shocked me. I had never seen the
law enforced in Mexico before. There are a million
regulations on the books in Mexico — zoning, anti-pollution
laws, electoral safeguards — a mirror of our own legalistic
system. But they are routinely ignored. In a country with a
multibillion-dollar drug industry and an infant mortality rate so
much above ours, who’s going to worry about water
conservation? Was a new attitude creeping in with American
money? Perhaps not. I watched two traffic cops in Cub Scout-blue uniforms pulling over cars. Some got tickets. Some
didn’t. A skinny man in a button shirt approached me (I’ll
call him Armando). He had family in Brooklyn. I spoke
Spanish so well. My girlfriend was so beautiful. Were we
Italian?

Armando was a hustler. He worked out of a sidewalk
booth, and his job was to offer tourists a rental car
discount in return for their having breakfast at his
employer’s hotel. I still don’t quite see how it worked.
Much of Cabo is under construction, and you learn to accept
works in progress. He gestured at the cops and rubbed a
finger in his palm. I asked him how this all had come to be.
He rubbed his hands together again. “Drug money? NAFTA
money?” I asked. He laughed. He pointed to the illuminated
globe of the Planet Hollywood sign, one of Cabo’s tallest
buildings. Planet Hollywood money. Hard Rock Money.

What interested me about fishing wasn’t the killing.
Fishing for marlin is like prospecting for gold anyway: You
generally come up empty. There are days when the entire Cabo
fleet of 100 boats doesn’t catch anything. Remember
Hemingway’s Santiago, his endlessly patient Old Man,
waiting, waiting, waiting for a marlin?

A year to the week before our visit to Cabo, a man
named Ed Kilwien of Kirkland, Wash., had landed a 910-pound
blue marlin. It took him three hours. In his picture in the
Los Cabos News, he looked slightly stoned, the fish hanging
from a contraption far above his head like it was about to
be dropped on him. I didn’t want to remove a magnificent
fish like Ed’s from the sea, but that wasn’t a problem. As I
understood it, except in tournaments, the boats in Cabo San
Lucas practice what’s called catch-and-release. Once you
hook a fish, you haul it in, snap a picture and either pull
the hook or cut the line. That I could deal with.

The concierge at Las Ventanas, a man named Marco, had a
gift for conjuring things — discount phone certificates,
rental cars, perfectly packed picnic lunches. We had been
unable to get space on a boat ourselves, but he had already
gotten us a boat from one of the best fleets in the harbor:
Picante. They had carried Ed Kilwien to glory. Our captain,
Capitá Hugo, was clearly a comer. He had a gold marlin
charm around his neck and wrap-around shades and was only 30
or so. He had caught 230 marlin last year and 240 already
this year. I told him when I’d gone fishing in 1974, I’d
hooked a sailfish off Mazatlán on the western coast of the
mainland. Jumping and tail-walking on the line, it might
have been the most beautiful creature I’d ever seen. The
captain and mate had fought over it. “Fuck,” Capitá Hugo
said, “in Mazatlán they’ll eat anything. Here we let them
go.”

We sailed past El Arco, the rocks at the end of Baja.
The Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Cortes join here. From the
water you see a different Baja. Because, of course, Cabo San
Lucas is not much like the rest of Baja. North of it and its
sister town of San Jose del Cabo, known collectively as Los
Cabos, things thin out quickly. There are the starkly
beautiful coasts where surfers hang out in their beat-up VW
Beetles. There are long sierras of burned grass and lush
mountains where rain clouds pile overhead. Everywhere runty
horses graze and steer meander down the road, trailing visitors as if they might be edible grass. Everywhere, the beaches and
sierras are empty.

We were a half mile offshore when suddenly the
continental shelf plunged away. The water was 1,000
feet deep. The mate put bright red plastic squid lures in
the water to catch the roving marlin’s eye. He pulled out
our picnic hamper from the hotel. Mostly he and Capitá Hugo
ignored us, steering their powerful boat in long arcs,
listening to CDs. We had a lot of technology on that boat.
We had a Robertson AP300X autopilot to help us steer, a Furono FCU 582 sounder to
spot the fish and a Furono 2681
display radar to make sure we didn’t hit anything else. We
were 35 feet long, weighed 18 tons and had dual inboard 750
horsepower engines capable of 31 knots. The boat had cost
$350,000.

That afternoon, we didn’t catch anything. Three hours
of trawling, the diesel smoke floating back into our faces,
and the marlins pitched a shutout. In fact we gave something
back. My girlfriend got sick and threw up the tuna steak
from Las Ventanas over the side. She used a deck rag
to clean up, and she admitted that just that little act of
retaking her perimeter had given her pleasure. When we got
back to port, I tried to tip Capitá Hugo. “For what?” he
asked, and walked away.

Our last day in Los Cabos we went back for another try.
It was 7 in the morning. The waiters at Cocomo were
cleaning up, but they were still dancing. A man was working
out on a treadmill in a harborside athletic club. Capitá
Hector took us out this time. “Hector,” he said, “King of
the Trojans.” He was heavier and older than Capitá Hugo. He
worked for Leo’s, one of the smaller fleets. We steamed out
of the harbor on his 25-foot trawler. On his marine radio
Capitá Hector gossipped with other captains. We bought a
bait fish the Mexicans call lisa from a little boat that
pulled up at our side. We caught some skipjack in case we
sighted a marlin. The lisa was the appetizer, the skipjack
would be the meal.

We trawled and we circled. Capitá Hector
opened a beer and scanned the horizon. He and his mate,
Gregory, sang old fishing songs with us. We had not had time
to get food, so they nicely shared their sandwiches. Capitá
Hector did a little marlin dance. After an hour, a line
popped. At last, a fish — hooked, I was sure, not by
technology but by our good karma.

I got into the fighting chair and dug in. The rod bent
almost to the stern gunwale. My muscles tightened. I
bent over the rod to keep it close to my chest, where my
strength is. The captain and mate watched as I began reeling
in. The fish rolled and tugged, but immediately I knew it
could not be a marlin. There was too little fight. Still, it
was a significant fish. I slowly began taking in line. I
would pull the rod back, then reel in as I lowered it. There
were times when I thought it had gone to sleep on me, other
times when I nearly lost my arms tugging. It was confusing
work.

Finally I dragged up a huge mahi-mahi. It was splendid
looking, a cascade of gold and green. I felt some sort of
charge, taking this iridescent thing out of the deep. It
was almost a psychological moment, like an old nightmare. I
looked forward, for the same reason, to throwing it back,
returning it. My girlfriend drew near to take a photograph.
I would call it “Picture of My Id.” Just then, Capitá Hugo
brought out a wooden club and whacked the fish on the head.
“Makes buen seviche,” he said. He threw it in the bin. He
was, it turned out, from Mazatlán.

My girlfriend was green. I was greener. As we sailed
on, we could see rigor mortis settling in, in the huge curved
tail sticking out of the stowing bin. A kind of guilt
settled between us, like we’d slain the albatross. I knew
this was ridiculous. Mahi-mahi are food fish, and I knew that
it was wrong to waste food. They had caught a fish and then
they had killed it. What could be more natural? These men
had no use for bourgeois squeamishness. We sailed on, and
caught nothing else. No barracuda, no sailfish, no marlin.
Capitá Hector drank his last beer, Gregory reeled in the
lines, the tiny trawler pointed its bow to port. We were
heading back, back to the post-industrial proving ground, to
that mix of dust and dollars that is Baja at century’s end.

“Paradise” begins in 1976 in Ruby, an affluent all-black Oklahoma town with a population of 360, and flashes back to the men and women who founded the town’s precursor, Haven, after the Civil War. Haven was decimated not by whites (there are hardly any whites in “Paradise”) but by the Depression, leading the children of its founders to pick up and move 240 miles to the west and try again.

Nearly every townsperson gets a cameo in the course of this narrative of flawed nation-building. What I wouldn’t give for a relationship chart. There are the town’s macho leaders, the twins Deacon and Steward Morgan. There are their wives, Soane and Dovey. Both know tragedy. One has had two sons die. The other has had multiple miscarriages, each punished according to the sins of the husband. There is an insurgent outside preacher named Reverend Misner, who is keeping court with an independent woman and store owner named Anna Flood. They are the closest thing to common sense in the town. And there is a no-good lothario named K.D., son of Deacon and Steward’s deceased sister Ruby, eponym of the town. Imagine a family reunion when you’re not quite catching the names.

The action, though, is simple. As the novel opens, a woman lies dead in the front hall of the Convent, a former Catholic retreat just outside Ruby. The town’s alpha menfolk have driven over and shot her, and now they are hunting down the house’s remaining inhabitants. Connie, Seneca, Grace, Pallas and Mavis are the prey, female refugees who gathered in this safe place. They have done nothing wrong. Their crime is otherness. Their practices are vaguely occult, vaguely Sapphic and vaguely threatening to law and order. The men mistrust them. In short, they are killed because they can be slain without consequence.

And afterward Ruby is a little bit sorry. Morrison writes: “Bewildered, angry, sad, frightened people pile into cars, making their way back … How hard they had worked for this place; how far away they once were from the terribleness they have just witnessed. How could so clean and blessed a mission devour itself and become the world they had escaped?” It would not, I think, be a leap to say there is a metaphor here.

There’s also a helluva trick, a real coup de theatre, in these last pages. “Beloved” is no longer Morrison’s only ghost story. But you’ll have to read from the opening scene, when the guns go off, to the final one, when the chickens come home to roost, to figure this out. This is an extraordinary novel from a Nobel Prize winner confident enough to try anything.

Dec. 7, 1997, from the Wall Street Journal: Microsoft today
announced it was buying the Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation for
$1.8 billion in Microsoft stock. “Bill was thinking of little Jennifer Katharine’s
face when she unwrapped the box,” a company spokeswoman said, almost
apologetically, adding, “Is this guy Dad of the Year or what?”

Dec. 9, 1997, from the Associated Press: Bill Gates today broke
down and gave the San Jose-based Apple Computer a used Gulfstream
jet. “Bill just felt uncomfortable watching his good friend Steve schlep
back and forth to Redmond in coach,” a Microsoft spokesman said, almost
apologetically, adding that Microsoft would comply with a Justice
Department subpoena for the receipt.

Dec. 11, 1997, from Variety: Former Disney topper Mike Ovitz
is the latest H-wood macher to plunk down big bucks for a Gulfstream jet.
“It’s always a pleasure to support a friend whose success is owing in no
small measure to me,” the ex-ten-percenter sed.

Dec. 15, 1997, from the Wall Street Journal: Microsoft announced
plans today to offer free plastic Gulfstream models to the first 100,000
users to log onto the new MS Gulfstream-Sidewalk Web site. The site
can be accessed only via Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. “Why should little
Jenny Gates be the only one with a new jet in her stocking?” Microsoft
asked in a press release. When the distinction between a 15-cent model and
the $21 million real thing was pointed out, a Microsoft spokeswoman said,
“You still don’t get it, do you?”

Dec. 17, 1997, from the New York Times: New York City officials
confirmed today that the Microsoft Corporation had loaned the Office of
the Mayor a new Gulfstream jet. “This is not, I repeat, not, connected
to MSNBC-Gulfstream-Sidewalk’s getting the old Channel 13 slot,” Director
of Communications Cristyne Lategano said, almost defensively, adding that
Mayor Giuliani would use the plane to travel “to various national
Republican strongholds as urgent city business dictates.”

Same day, Los Angeles Times: Microsoft announced today that it had
loaned Dreamworks SKG a trio of GulfStream Vs with Saarinen flight
chairs in brushed velvet for the use of its executive team. “I’ve never
understood Bill’s issue with conspicuous consumption,” Mr. Geffen said with
a shrug, “but this sends a signal that he cares about fostering the best
possible work environment for artists.”

Dec. 19, 1997, from Bloomberg Business News: In a move that took both
industries by surprise, Bill Gates bought the Boeing Corporation for
$21 billion in Microsoft stock today. “Bill was growing frustrated with the
whole private-jet gestalt,” a Microsoft spokeswoman said, almost
apologetically, adding, “he is, and always will be, a small ‘d’ democrat.”

Dec. 20, 1997, from the Los Angeles Times: Microsoft announced
today that it had provided a cash infusion to Dreamworks MSKG, as
the new joint operation will be called. The company will shift its focus to
in-flight entertainment. At the same time, Microsoft took Michael Ovitz’s
lightly soiled private jet off his hands for the full purchase price less a
modest 10 percent restocking fee. “Bill just likes to help his friends
out,” a Microsoft spokeswoman said, almost apologetically.

Dec. 21, 1997, from Newsday: A tearful and defiant Mayor Rudy
Giuliani today broke down and agreed to swap his official residence for
the Marine Air Terminal at LaGuardia Airport, now named Microsoft
Explorer Port.com. “There’s been some misreporting on this one,” a
Microsoft spokeswoman said, almost apologetically. “Bill never said he’d
lose his landing rights if he didn’t vacate Gracie Mansion.”

Dec. 22, 1997, from The Financial Times: The Microsoft Corporation
announced its plans today to acquire the Anglo-French consortium Airbus
Cie. for $17 billion in Microsoft stock. “Europe has all those
paintings and old buildings and one day Bill will want to introduce
Jennifer to art,” a Microsoft spokeswoman said, almost apologetically,
denying reports that Mr Gates plans to merge Airbus and Boeing to form
Microsoft Air. “That’s baseless innuendo supplied by government Luddites
and our competitors in private industry,” the spokeswoman responded.

Dec. 27, 1997, from USA Today: Microsoft will buy National Airport
from Washington, D.C.’s nearly bankrupt city government. The airport will
join the former LaGuardia as a hub for Microsoft Air.

Dec. 30, 1997, from the Washington Post: Senior administration
officials acknowledged today that the U.S. government was selling
the nation’s air traffic control system to Microsoft in exchange for 1
million shares of Microsoft stock. After word leaked from Washington, the
company moved quickly to spin the deal. “We just thought, gee, wouldn’t it
be neat if every time a Microsoft Air plane landed at a Microsoft airport,
there was Microsoft software to guide it in,” chairman Bill Gates said at a
press conference. Professor Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law School, the
“special master” appointed by U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson
to evaluate Microsoft’s compliance with its 1995 antitrust settlement,
called the move “cause for deep concern,” but added that he was having
trouble getting a flight to Washington to confer with Attorney General
Janet Reno. “Well, where does he want to go today?.” Gates
responded, demonstrating his well-known boyish sense of humor.

Some of the other stories seem more like journalism lightly fictionalized, but there’s a real treat waiting at the end: the final tale, “The Finest Wife.” In it, Rose, a 70-ish school bus driver, finds her route filled one dreamy day with the lovers of her promiscuous youth. The narrator explains that before her marriage “she had … a taste for certain types of church-going men and also for left-handed men, and for servicemen, fishermen, postmen, assemblymen, firemen, highwaymen, elevator repairmen, and the Mexican busboys at the restaurant where she worked.”

As she drives on, these old lovers pile in, each still appreciative. Then her husband boards, and everyone makes room for him. Without irony, they congratulate him on his luck. The bus pulls to a stop at a railroad crossing, and, as the busload of elders dozes off, a series of train cars with words on them, “a continuing, alphabetical account of all of a life’s ingredients,” pass by. This is a wonderful story, lithe, wise and gently surreal. It is also, as it happens, the only story in this collection that could not have begun in a journalist’s notebook. It is, in the best sense of the word, pure fiction.

These were the novelists who took over American culture at precisely the
moment when American culture was taking over the world. Bellow wrestled
American writing from the grip of Hemingway; Mailer, through his protean,
highly uneven talent, moved the American intellectual from bookworm past
activist to showman; and Roth invested American fiction with a depth many
thought beyond our national capacity. They were an aggressive clan —
offensive to women, to the squeamish and, most of all, by their very
prominence, to the WASP establishment. And as part of the power shift
that carried the Jew from outsider to insider, for all the jangled nerves
they caused among caretakers of the Jewish image, they made other
American Jews — particularly urban Jews — proud.

But that was a long time ago. In “Humboldt’s Gift,” Bellow writes that
Americans like their poets to die young because it makes the rest of us
feel tough. I had begun to wonder whether something similar hadn’t become
true for novelists. These writers have left no heirs, and nearly 40
years after the youngest, Roth, debuted with “Goodbye, Columbus,” we know
they won’t. Thirty-one-year-old fiction writer Thomas Beller met Bellow at a
cocktail party in 1991 and introduced himself. “Beller?” he recalls the
response, “that sounds enough like Bellow that I think I can remember
it.” No, mentoring is not in their make-up. Either they are still the
game or the game is over.

Having grown up across the street from the West Side’s old New Yorker
bookstore, I can remember people climbing the treacherous stairs in
search of the new Bellow, the new Roth, the new Malamud (Bellow dubbed
their troika Hart, Schaffner & Marx). You knew writers from their work
and the black-and-white photograph on the dust jacket. That peek-a-boo
was all you got. But how do such literary lions play now that fiction
readers are addicted to memoirs? As Bellow might put it, you’d have to be
a fool not to realize the literary racket has changed. In 1964, Esquire
ran a map of the literary universe that placed the Partisan Review in the
“red hot center.” Twenty-five years later, Esquire updated the feature,
with ICM agent Amanda “Binky” Urban where the Review had been. Today
it would have to be “Oprah.”

Still, the machers have shown remarkable staying power in our cultural
imagination, outlasting not only their contemporaries but changes that
have altered beyond recognition the vast literary and cultural machine
that created them. Literacy rates have plummeted, the Web competes with
television for scarcer and scarcer free time, universities that gave
shelter to novelists after the magazine fiction market disappeared are
out of money, and women have come to dominate not just publishing, but
the means — bookstores, talk shows, college courses — by which authors’
reputations are made. This would seem like a death sentence. And yet, a
book by Norman Mailer is still an event. The question should perhaps be,
then, not how much these male writers have lost, but how well they’ve
come through. They are routinely portrayed as static or even reactionary
talents in a swirling cultural cauldron, but in truth Mailer, Bellow and
Roth have shown a keen ability to adapt, to stay current, to remain, in
that favorite ’60s phrase, relevant. Compare them, for example, to Heller
today. For that matter, where is Susan Sontag?

I called the novelists for their own take. Mailer’s assistant said he
would agree to be interviewed only if the article were solely about him.
I thought of Woody Allen’s suggestion that he donate his ego to science.

I next turned to Bellow, who is the most collegial of the three. He
helped put Roth on the map when the Weequahican was his graduate student
at the University of Chicago. Soon after, he exercised droit du seigneur
and picked Roth’s pocket of a girlfriend who would later become his
second wife, Susan Glassman. Roth got a bit of his own back in “The Ghost
Writer” with his portrait of Chicago literary mandarin Felix Abravamal, a
novelist so hoity-toity he lives in his own “egosphere.” Bellow was not
amused, but somehow the friendship survived. Bellow recently suggested
Roth for the Nobel Prize. (He also joked he would give Mailer the one he
had if Mailer had anything to trade for it.) But Bellow turned out to be
a tease. His assistant said he might call; he would call; if he did call,
it would be without warning, stay by the phone. I felt like Tommy Wilhelm
in “Seize the Day,” a “childish mind that thinks people are ready to give
it just because (you) need it.” And I wound up just as disappointed. It
turned out that he’d already given a long, raunchy interview to Playboy.
He was tapped out.

Roth exhibited a bunker mentality worthy of “Operation Shylock.” His
Manhattan and Connecticut numbers had been changed. He prefers to
initiate calls to people outside his inner circle to keep his number secret. “He
wants to stay away from interviews and that sort of thing for the
moment,” says William Styron, a longtime friend, adding that Claire
Bloom’s memoir, “Leaving the Doll House,” caused Roth “a lot of pain.”

In “The Ghost Writer,” Nathan Zuckerman, essentially Roth with libel
protection, tells novelist E.I. Lonoff, a stand-in for Bernard Malamud, “No one
with seven books in New York City settles for one piece of ass. That’s
what you get for a couplet.” Bellow and Mailer, with 39 books
and 11 wives between them, are bracing for a taste of what Roth (two
wives, 21 books) got last year from Bloom. “They obviously aren’t
anything you’d want your sister to date,” says a publisher friendly with
all three.

In “Handsome Is,” Harriet Wasserman, Bellow’s longtime agent, recounts
their one-night stand, their intense collaboration and the end of their
professional romance, a Bellovian denouement in which he tried to get her
to fire herself. Ultimately Bellow joined Mailer and Roth at the Andrew
Wylie agency. He and the woman he talked to every day for more than
20 years have not spoken since. Like Bloom, Wasserman, equally
unconvincingly, says she isn’t interested in revenge. “I always felt like
a character in a Saul Bellow novel,” she says, “so I thought, why not
write it?”

And Mailer’s second wife, Adele Mailer, in her new memoir, “Life of the
Party,” details a nightmarish marriage to a ’50s Mailer even more
drug-addled, horny and socially ambitious than he has portrayed himself
to be. This was the period when “Barbary Shore” and “Deer Park” were
landing with a thud not equaled until the Brat Packers stumbled in the
late ’80s. We already know that Mailer stabbed this wife during a drunken
rage after a poor turnout at a campaign fund-raiser for his mayoral race.
But now we learn Mailer liked to unwind by listening to Dave Brubeck
played at full volume. And that at a 1961 nudist party in Provincetown
thrown by Dwight MacDonald, he was too shy to take off his undershorts.
Recently, Gloria Steinem’s biographer wrote that when Steinem and
Mailer went to bed, Mailer could not perform. For the man who dubbed
himself the Prizewinner in “The Prisoner of Sex,” this is rough stuff.

It’s been a tough few years all around for Mailer.
Michiko Kakutani crucified “The Gospel According to the Son” in the New York Times, calling it “a pale,
user-friendly version of … the Bible … flattened out (with) New Agey
language.” It was Kakutani’s second killer review in a row of Mailer’s
work. And both ran ahead of the book’s publication date, as if Kakutani
wanted to make sure no one missed her point. In truth, “Gospel” has
little to recommend it — a more timid writer would have put it in the
drawer — but Mailer could be forgiven for sharing a little of Roth’s
paranoia as he goes back to work. Besides, with “Gospel” now on the
bestseller list and “American Pastoral” and “The Actual” nowhere in
sight, Mailer may have achieved the long-sought grail of the novelist: he
may be review-proof.

Kakutani has slapped Roth’s hand too, though the blow seemed delivered
more for instruction than punishment. His “Sabbath’s Theatre” features an
unrepentant sexual harasser named Mickey Sabbath who is ultimately
brought up on charges before a humorless dean named by Roth, perhaps
unwisely, Kimiko Kakuzaki. Kakutani trounced “Sabbath’s Theatre” so
thoroughly that even Mailer, who feels little love for Roth, came to his
defense in a letter to the Times. “It was pretty funny, Norman chinning
himself up on Philip,” remembers novelist Richard Stern, a friend of Roth’s
and Bellow’s from their Chicago days. The book went on to win the
National Book Award.

But Kakutani has fallen in love with “American
Pastoral,” Roth’s big novel of the turmoil of the ’60s, praising in
particular its handling of women, especially the character of Dawn, the
wife of the protagonist, aging sports legend Seymour “Swede” Levov. Dawn,
Kakutani wrote, with somewhat confusing syntax, is “a woman who is
neither a castrating witch nor a passive doormat — something of a rare
occurrence in recent Roth novels — but a fully fashioned human being.”

Most critics have agreed with Kakutani this time, similarly relieved
that Roth/Zuckerman bows out one-quarter of the way through “American
Pastoral” and leaves the field to a more likable fellow. I felt the
exact opposite, missing every page the solipsistic and prickly
Roth/Zuckerman was gone. “Sabbath’s Theatre” may be the less uplifting but it is
by far the better of the two novels: “American Pastoral” reads like a
self-conscious try at a book with Big Themes, full of undigested American
history, undigested Newark history, undigested glove-industry history. It
is as if Thomas Wolfe, whom Roth loved as an adolescent, had reinfected
him.

It is also the first of Roth’s novels, according to his friends, to
be composed on a word processor. “The muse needs its harness,” cautions
John Updike. According to Bloom’s memoir, Roth blamed Updike’s harsh New
Yorker review of “Operation Shylock” for his decision to check into a
psychiatric hospital. But Updike says he is not honing the blade for “American Pastoral,” which seems to take more than a page
from “Rabbit Redux.”

“You
could as well say I’ve gone Rothean,” says Updike, “My last novel (‘In the Beauty of the Lillies’) starts out
in New Jersey.”

Like Roth, Updike knows what it’s like to be tagged as a misogynist. He has had his
own battles, especially after “The Witches of Eastwick.” “I responded by
trying to write more about women and to write more deeply. You look into
your heart and ask, ‘Am I really a male chauvinist? Am I really a sexist?’”

Friends say Bellow resists such introspection. “He’s smart about the
money he’s made,” says a longtime friend. “He doesn’t live high. He
doesn’t give a shit.” “Bellow’s writing for the angels,” is Updike’s take.

Bellow’s new novella confirms both opinions. “The Actual” is a brief,
elegant, unapologetic story of a retired Chicago businessman and the
zaftig woman he has loved and fantasized about through four decades. It
proves, if nothing else, that Bellow, is still a tit man. In the end he
wins his beloved’s hand in a cemetery.

Bellow too feels the hot breath of the P.C. culture on his back. His
too-quotable defense of Western literature in 1994 — “Who is the Tolstoy
of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?” — left him working damage
control on the op-ed page of the Times, claiming he had been
misunderstood. Novelists, after all, need young readers if they are to
last. The year after “Herzog” became a hit in 1964, Glamour magazine
dispatched a correspondent to Chicago to interview the then-little-known
writer. “It’s so easy to play a role before the public,” Bellow told a
kittenish freelancer, none other than Gloria Steinem. “Women write you
letters asking how they should entertain a Jewish intellectual. (But) how
much time have you got?”

Eleven years later Vivian Gornick wrote a cover story for the Village
Voice with mug shots of Roth, Mailer, Bellow and Henry Miller, and the
cover line “Why Do These Men Hate Women?” Part of the evidence was the
very same “Herzog” book, whose women Gornick found “dreadful
caricatures.” “When I read Mailer, Roth and the later Bellow,” Gornick
wrote, “not much lives except the self-absorption … the sullen
vanities … the forfeited talents.” The article was a sensation. Gornick
recalls Susan Glassman, now divorced from Bellow, coming up to her at a
party and shaking her hand. Today Gornick says she would not bother. “At
the time they were in the cat-bird seat. They were the enemy. Now their
readership is limited to the Jewish Community Center.”

Some rough numbers suggest she has a point. Roth’s three-book contract
for “Deception,” “Patrimony” and “Operation Shylock,” said to be for
$1.7 million, left Simon & Schuster deeply in the red. For “Sabbath’s
Theatre,” he changed publishers. Mailer, his new bestseller
notwithstanding, has been a huge loss-leader for his publisher. “I can
see why Mailer writes the books he’s writing,” a writer who admires him
told me. “What I can’t see is why Random House lets him.”

Bellow’s fastest selling book was “Herzog,” which sold 430,000 hardcover
copies in 1964-65 alone. “More Die of Heartbreak,” his last full-length
novel, published in 1985, sold 60,000 copies. “Bellow said to me once,”
recalls his biographer, James Atlas, “and it was very touching actually,
that he had no idea that their moment would be so brief. They feel
superseded by the advent of multiculturalism and the demands of other
literary constituencies.”

But the streets of Chicago, Newark and Brooklyn made these writers
nothing if not tough. Bellow, 81, Mailer, 74, Roth, 64 — with a Nobel
Prize, three Pulitzers and six National Book Awards among them — aren’t
giving up the brass ring yet. Roth, despite a recent bypass operation,
has said he expects to maintain his current book-every-other-year clip.
Bellow, who nearly died two years ago from contaminated seafood he ate on
vacation, has two novels started. In one, he has told friends, he will
lay to rest the myth he cannot write a fully-fleshed out female
character. And Mailer is now supposed to be at work on his “Harlot’s
Ghost” Part II.

“That’s the one thing you have to say for the boys,” says
Roger W. Straus, president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “In many instances
they still succeed in writing serious books. They don’t just sit there
and fart around.”