"What's your idea of who runs things?"
The words are from Saul Bellow's The Victim (1947), but the question is one that in many different forms runs through Amer- ican fiction of the last 30 years.
One of the most important writers who has endeavored to give some sort of fictional outline and metaphorical definition to power and its modes of operation is Norman Mailer. This has taken him from actual political conventions and demonstrations to the technology of moon rockets, the significance...