An American Dream [Paperback]

 

 

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Proust? James? Joyce? They're great writers but why would I want to read about lives so similar to my own? I can't lounge around in posh hotel lobbies posturing and reeking of decadent snobbery while I woo impressionable young women if I'm wasting my time reading about it! I know people who loudly renounce authors whom they have never read. I know people who feel instant self gratification upon knowing that there might be someone in the room who hasn't read DeLillo's Underworld. But I have never known anyone of any intelligence who doesn't get a kick out of Mailer. He's Jackie Collins with brass balls. An American Dream is a darkly entertaining, well-written, escapist saga. The characters are interesting and active, and the ideas are sometimes brutish, but so is life. Sure, mentioning Mailer might draw snickers from the tweed-and-elbow-patch crowd, but the porn-loving high-school senior in all of us should be allowed to have a good read once in a while!

God.. i'm so tired of reading posts that endlessly and pedantically harp-on mailer's philosophizing, and theorizing and wordage - both his number and style, calling finally to his use of "mumbo-jumbo" or mystic insights; far-out or nihilism/debauchery depicting imagery and symbolism to debunk him. Yes, his sentences are overlong; yes he can be overblown and fancy; yes, he's a cool cat with a self-styled poet's reputation to prove. Overwrought, overcooked metaphors abound. Fusillades of words come out of no where. He's an onslaught and sensory overload; and his prose is charged with an almost psychopathic zeal/fervor. But that's the point. Remove any of that from the question, the mania of his style, and you topple the foundation of one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. And if you don't like this book for the aforementioned reasons, try to read his Armies of the Night, a pulitizer prize winner, quite a contrast to his other pulitzer prize winner, Exe's Son, which is very economically and even stoicly written. in E. S., Mailer writes with the detached eye of the scientific observer, the objective, unimposing journalist, cataloging and chronicaling a nearly recoved ex-con's slow descent with a befriending family into a murdering rage. It's a spit in the eye at the stifling effects of american conventionality. But it's spit that needs no embellishment, no elaboration. The argument is there implicitly. Nothing needs to be added or tacked on, there is no rabble-rousing, no polemic or paen to the evils or the goods of prison and the manifestly holy image of "prisoner" established in Mailer's philosophical vocabulary. He's impossibly restrained. None of his personality is present at all. But in his first foray into nonfiction, his verbose tendencies return, and some of the phases he uses, "burgeoning meat" for example, to describe high-schoolers, smile-faced and bouncing around in the back of a school bus, is a bit overdone.
But we live in an age where concision and snappiness of expression has come to supersede and override in importance the need to be beautiful. Our own industrial efficency has become our partner in literary efficency. We don't read linearly, we don't care about the substantive interdependency of words, we don't look for paragraphs that have a certain tensile neatness, where not a single word can be removed or added. We want essences. We want the trees without the ornaments. We want variety, diversity offered up in pill-sized portions, so that we can maximize our multicultural apprecation. We want that. Not probing philosophical mediations on - in contemporary terms - outdated social figures: the seemingly ordinary man, snapping and killing his wife (mailer called marriage an "excrementious relatioship". The two parties sling feces at one another. The marriages that last are the ones which survive on the brink of maddening vindictiveness and intensity.)

It's important that I mention marriage because the main character's own growth describes in a certain fashion the arc of a marriage, a marriage with American ideals. In effect, by killing the woman he marries, the woman who embodies all the unspeakably infuriating hyporcises and sanctimonies of America during the sixiies, he in effect kills his own past self, the underdeveloped man-boy who loved father, flag, and country dearly, and who was eventually betrayed by all. So his latter journey though the seamy night-life, the medieval savergy, the "on the vergeness" of bedlam, that sordid nyc can be like - can't we all remember the black out? - is a journey to find who he was, a journey, from beginning as a duely honored and decorated a war hero, to a drug-addled, booze-swilling, knife-fighting deviant new york hedonist, a man who fights for his own pleasure and lives on the edge of suicide and murder because he knows in a world full of absurdities living like that is the least absurd to do. It's an allegory for the happy days of lovey-dovey, "oh be still my heart" marriage, to the days when one gleefully and amorally goes out with a bunch of friends to pick up a group of big-breasted floozies to boink and throw away. The fakeness of the world that surrounds us and the consequent lack of simtulation we find in it, can sometimes resemble the very fakeness and disenchantment of a 20 year-old marriage. The intolerability of it and the freaknick that we experience when we break away from its banal binds, the desire to be bon vivants, men-about-town, is almost irresistible. Rojack simply carries this to the most extreme degree, loosing all inhibition and cutting away the veneers of happy american life that trammeled him and his heart for so long.

So it's really a story of redemption, redemption followed by purging. It's a cankerous, infected mass the american center of ideals, and the only way to break away from it is to excise it, chop it out cleanly and live like a philosophical freak, one who ostensibly defies all sense and reason.

There is of course the added sidenote that this character, Rojack, is a near doppleganger of Mailer. He's an ex-politican, mailered tried running for mayor once or twice, a war hero, mailer fancied himself one even though all he did was cut-potatoes and type, and a public figure, which mailer is, and a wife killer, which mailer attempted but failed to be.

This really is the quintessential tome of secret Mailer fantasies, and a story from becoming one's country's hero but conversely one's own enemy, to becoming one's countries enemy to one's own hero.

I couldn't believe this is the author of "The Naked and the Dead", "Harlot's Ghost", and "The Executioner's Song"! I think for this book Mailer tried a little too hard to be "cool", "stylistic", whatever, and ended up looking like an unconvincing show-off. Not worth the trouble.

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3.0 out of 5 stars Not my cup of tea
Reading An American Dream is sort of like reading Shakespeare; you eventually start wondering if people actually talked like that. Read more

Published on Jan 14 2004 by Todd Rennells

2.0 out of 5 stars Doesn't quite work
An American Dream is occasionally compelling, but it ultimately proves to be a messy train-wreck of a novel. Read more

Published on Dec 17 2003 by Christopher A. Smith

1.0 out of 5 stars A Foray Into the Verbose
Longwinded narcissist, Norman Mailer, is at it again. Everyone I've talked to hasn't been able to finish his novels. Read more

Published on Dec 7 2003

1.0 out of 5 stars Pretentious ...
The sensibility Mailer is so proud of conveying here is that of Rojack, a boring wife-murderer with all the usual pseudo-Hemingwayesque appurtenances. Read more

Published on Oct 3 2002

4.0 out of 5 stars An American Dream (Wr. by Norman Mailer)
You think Gary Condit has problems? Stephen Rojack is a former congressman, contemporary of John F. Kennedy, popular TV talk show host... Read more

Published on May 20 2002 by Charles Tatum

4.0 out of 5 stars A wonderfully sick satire.
I had two expectations of this book that bore no fruit. An english teacher I had at Columbia described the plot in such a manner as to make one feel the protagonist would be such... Read more

Published on Dec 27 2001 by E. Steven Fried

2.0 out of 5 stars More nonsense from Mailer
"Dream" is right. Mailer paints himself as a war hero. Don't we all. War hero, sports hero, world leader, whatever. Read more

Published on Aug 17 2000 by Len Feder

1.0 out of 5 stars Mailer Bomb
I know people who reread Proust every year. I know people whose favorite book is Finnegan's Wake. But I have never known anyone of any intelligence who has made it through a... Read more

Published on July 13 2000

1.0 out of 5 stars A guy's book
This book is about power and masochism. All the female characters are witches. The main character (Rojack)is a pathetic, manic-depressive sociopath who thinks the moon is talking... Read more

Published on Jun 11 2000 by fredman8

5.0 out of 5 stars Dark, fatalistic and marvellous!
The typically deified American: war hero, Congressman and TV star; his perceived perfect life is wracked with turmoil as the devils inside him turn him into a suicidal, homicidal,... Read more

Published on May 15 2000 by Conno

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