An American Dream

Rating:
Summary: -
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Gripping Masterpiece
Review: I've read this book in September, and I must say that despite some obvious Dostoevsky elements, it stands out as one of the brilliant commentaries on high society of New York in the 1960s.

Master Mailer has once again proven after two previous mediocre novels that he can infuse passion and brilliance into his fiction. Master Mailer also brilliantly weaves together the famous stabbing incident of Adele (his second wife) and his existential fascination with violence and the underground world of hipsters to expose layers of flaw within the American society of the day. That the plot begins with a man murdering his wife should, by no means, be misconstrued as psychotic or misogynistic. It is simply a device in which to explore what is wrong with the American upper class of the day. In this regard, it is original in its form, undoubtedly controversial. I also felt that its theme dealt with a Man's struggle to maintain his manhood, his masculinity amid enormous social pressure.

Just as Yossarian's desertion in CATCH-22 gave its readers hope, I found Rojack's liberation from his burdens very uplifting. The book is all together an intense psychedelic trip, although his poetic language, at times, detracts from the flow of the gut-wrenching prose. It is one of a kind.

Readers might like to know that this book is number two on my reading list!

Rating:
Summary: Life in New York city drives you crazy...
Review: Norman Mailer writes like a man possessed. His prose is dazzling and vivid but difficult to negotiate, consisting as it does of a torrent of words conveying so many images it's sometimes hard to follow. Its updated stream of consciousness style left me giddy and breathless, not always a pleasurable experience when you have to re-read large tracts to get the meaning. Non-American readers like me may find the colloquilism and some of the references difficult to connect with, but that limitation is mine alone. The novel's premise is fascinating. Stephen hears the moon urging him to suicide. He is tempted but hesitates, then goes home to murder his wife. Hard as nails (Mailer implies that's the only way to survive in New York City), Stephen's self protective instincts rises to the fore to help him make it through the murder investigation and the much anticipated confrontation with his father-in-law, but not without a good dose of tender loving care administered by a moll named Cherry. Naturally, Stephen escapes death yet again but guess who pays for it ? "An American Dream" is Mailer's masculine and testosterone-charged account of sex, politics, corruption and sleaze in the Big Apple. It is a highly impressive piece of work but I confess to being a little out of my depth with the lyricism which I found excessive.

Rating:
Summary: An American Dream (Wr. by Norman Mailer)
Review: You think Gary Condit has problems? Stephen Rojack is a former congressman, contemporary of John F. Kennedy, popular TV talk show host... and he has just strangled his estranged wife to death.

To cover his crime, he tosses her out of a tenth story window, then meets up with a gangster's moll/lounge singer named Cherry. If ever a character was written to be played by Charlize Theron, this is it. The police suddenly drop their suspicions of murder against Rojack because they have bigger fish to fry- namely some of Cherry's mobster friends. The novel takes a look at a day and a half in the life of Rojack, following his rendezvous with Cherry, Ruta (his wife's maid), and his eventual meeting with his wife's father, culminating with his own high rise theatrics.

This book moves very fast. The reader loves to hate Rojack. The novel is from his point of view, so we see the inner workings of his alcohol soaked mind. Mailer's descriptions are lucid, dense, and brilliant. You feel like you are in 1963 New York City, running from the police, smelling the smells of the squad room, and making love to exotic women.

What does not work here are the kind of mobsters that were threatening in 1963, but come off like characters in a bad straight to video Eddie Deezen comedy today. There is a subplot involving some of the characters' involvement in the CIA that is also dated, and Mailer's attempts at magical fantasies that Rojack takes us on in his mind are over the top and dull.

Other reviews I have read have mentioned this is a good starter to a Mailerphyte, and I would agree. "An American Dream" is entertaining, but not a perfect tome.

This novel features a lot of sex, violence, profanity, and more alcohol consumption than a frat during rush week, so the kiddies probably should not have this Dream.