An American Dream (Vintage International (Paperback))

Rating:
Summary: In response to Christopher Smith's review
Review: American Dream not only looks forward to other books, as you note, it also looks back to "The White Negro" and "The Time of Her Time," both in Mailer's Advertisements for Myself.

WN is an essay extolling the virtures of violence as a way to save one's soul, redeem one's manhood, break the shackles of convention. Time of Her Time is a short story (or a fragment of a novel) in which the fictional Sergius (much the same character as Rojack of An American Dream) sees sexual encounters as battle grounds in which he fights for his own manhood.

Much can be made about the graphic sex in Mailer's writing, and in part it has become a truism of literary criticism that he was writing against the strictures of 1950's censorship and propriety. But I feel strongly that too much of his work--American Dream and WN are stunning examples--recommends violence, sometimes violence against victims who can't defend themselves.

Why do I give Am. Dream lots of stars? Because it is--as I remember--powerful and well written for a reader who is prepared to suspend disbelief and enter the fictive world of the artist. But the message is appalling, and I look forward to a time when it might be viewed (both message and book) as a historical artifact from a period both physically and psychically violent.

(Although a main character who murders and rapes--yes, it's difficult to think of the sexual bout with Ruta as anything else--is not necessarily speaking or acting for the author, the tone of Am. Dream as well as the WN essay indicates that Stephen Rojack is the author's "hero.")

Rating:
Summary: Doesn't quite work
Review: An American Dream is occasionally compelling, but it ultimately proves to be a messy train-wreck of a novel. Mailer heaps lurid details on top of a convoluted plot and an eccentric cast of characters who cross paths in unlikely ways, but the threads of the story never manage to pull together.

Stephen Rojack is an ex-politician, war hero, and public intellectual who murders his wife, and who in the aftermath goes on a bizarre rollercoaster through the gutters of Manhattan, a journey which leads him to some surprising revelations.

In reading An American Dream I often felt that the novel was a sort of experiment in Mailer's eyes; several elements appear that he would revisit in other novels. He again looks through the eyes of a killer in Executioner's Song, and he writes about spies, gangsters, and JFK again in the Harlot's Ghost, his excellent epic fictionalized story of the CIA.

There are a couple of sterling moments in which Mailer's skill as a writer shines. In the first, Rojack, the protagonist, recounts an experience rushing a German machine gun nest. Mailer does a perfect job of painting the out-of-body otherworldliness of the moment. The second occurs when Rojack approaches a woman in a bar and ends up in a tense standoff with the gangsters who are accompanying her. Both instances are excellently drawn sketches of violence, one carried out through action, the other threatened but unrealized.

A few strong passages notwithstanding, this is an unfocused under-edited novel full of opaque philosophizing and flat characters. An interesting experiment, but it doesn't quite work.

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: Not his best
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Dark Genius
Review: Mailer's meditation on violence and evil will not be everyone's idea of a good novel to read on the beach, but "An American Dream" is a brilliantly realized fantasy wherein one set-upon, White alcoholic protagonist berserks himself into a series of delirium fueled rages to rid himself of the crushing banality of the culture that he feels is killing him by the inch.

To do this, he commits a series of violent and insane acts , in an alcoholic haze, challenges sent him by the moon (really) whose successful completion might give him a hint of the freedom he dreams is beyond the neon-lit tarp of the Manhattan skyline.

This pilgrim's progress is nothing short of an obscene fantasy, wherein our hero, a decorated war hero, former congressman and talk show host, strangles his maddening estranged wife, buggers the German maid, steals a Mafia don's girl friend, and proceeds, in 24 hours, to lie and deceive the New York City Police Department, the Mob, with intimations that the FBI and CIA are involved invisibly in the mess he created.

The plot, of course, is lurid , absurd and the product of a particular time, but Mailer's novel comes at a time when the Hemingway cult of quiet, manly stoicism managed through a singular, privately held code of honor was exhausted of compelling narrative potential.Mailer's idea was to see what would happen if the man who might have been the Hemingway hero, suffering his hurts in some poetic privacy, had instead a psychotic break.

Gone, we see, are the hard-carved minimalism of the Hemingway style, with Mailer offering a delirious metaphorical ride through the ugly side of individual realization. His character, Stephen Rozack, is akin to King Lear in the rain, gone insane precisely because he no longer has the stagings guiding his eye and thinking.

In the clutch of his tantrums, the world finally seems to pull back its shroud and reveal the shape and purring function of its true nature; Rozack sees cities of diamonds, rains of falling stars, he smells and tastes those things never served on a plate. Mailer's great chains of metaphors deliver a dissolving sensibility that sees, fleetingly, the way everything is connected ,the hand of an anonymous God directing His actors in ways unannounced and never explained. Rid of the props and story lines, there is nothing left, an emptiness that can only be filled with increasing amounts of destruction. This is a riveting , wild, and enthralling exploration into the romanticizing of prescriptive violence. Troubling, agitated, problematic for great numbers of readers,a brilliant novel despite its flaws.It may be even because of the flaws--the unreal dialogue, the haphazard cramming of a week's worth of events into a single 24 hour period--that bring the long runs of sentences shriek and burn so splendidly, as there is the sense Roszak's state is a dream within which he must confront and conquer every blatant and disguised dread. The crash and slam of the plot dynamics--bare in mind that there is very little slack space here where one is allowed to rest and gather their wits in the midst of this ludicrous plot--get an intensity of feeling just right, that the world and the things in it are crushing down upon you, and your only option in the delirium is to obey the first fleeting voice that commands to respond, attack, destroy that which is killing you by the psychic inch. Mailer had written in his infamous essay "The White Negro" that it was one's moral responsibility to "encourage the psychopath within oneself" so to be able to experience greater and more expansive perceptions, to generate a new knowledge violently dislodged from murderous conformism. In An American Dream, he conducts a fictional field study of his theory by setting it loose in the plot of a novel, and the results are exhilarating as they are nearly unspeakable.

A reader who might be intrigued by Mailer's fictional realization of his existential anti-hero/hipster/White Negro
wouldn't be wrong to think that the author himself is disturbed by the furthest reach of his imaginative takes on the purgative value of sudden and decisive violence. Indeed, from this point on, Mailer's ideas about violence and power come with more caution, nuance, and in a brilliant turn to begin his moral argument about the cause of aggression in the culture, he penned his brief, obscene and fantastically incandescent novel "Why Are We In Viet Nam": if Stephen Roszack was the result of an psychically emasculated man given in to floating voices and lunar impulses in the wan hope of being delivered from what is killing him by the inch, only to become only a more complicated expression of those mechanisms that generate the larger , global evil, "Why Are We in Viet?" takes the more expansive view.

The question isn't answered, nor is Viet Nam even mentioned until the last page of the book, yet by the time you reach the end of this brief and and ingeniously offered account of an Alaskan bear hunt, we've gone through something primordial, a cultural conditioning that produces a need for violence at the most rudimentary level of the culture. Mailer's habit of romanticizing violence and macho performances ends with this second book, and the serious shift into the causes, conditions of our troubles begins in earnest, leading Mailer through a fantastic series of novels and nonfiction.

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: Lurid and Not Mailer's Best by a Longshot!
Review: One gets the impression here that the famous author is "showing off" his knowledge of New York big shots, big money, big violence (including murder and rape), big hotels (the Waldorf), and having a scalding ego trip in the process. Also doing some big, unnecessary namedropping (like JFK- the biggest name at the time). Sure this book has its moments, though the unnecessary sadism trumps most of them! In fact, I'm usually a big admirer or this many faceted penmen. His collection "Time of our Times" is among the great single author anthologies out there (chosen by Mr. Mailer, no less!)..So even if this one's not a real dog, given the vast quality of much of his stuff, this one should be kept near the bottom of his, mostly outstanding, oevre!

Rating:
Summary: Not my cup of tea
Review: Reading An American Dream is sort of like reading Shakespeare; you eventually start wondering if people actually talked like that. Of course, the time period of this book is just a few decades ago (the early 1960s), so it's hard to believe they did. There's a conversation between main character Rojack and a jazz singer named Shago Martin that is almost completely nonsensical. The narration of the book (by Rojack) is not much better, filled with lines that sound profound until you actually think about them. Like this little gem:

"There was pain now in the sound, and such a truth in the grief that I knew she was crying not for Deborah, not even quite for herself, but rather for the unmitigatable fact that women who have discovered the power of sex are never far from suicide."

Uh... right. The other factor of this book that crippled my ability to enjoy it was the fact that Rojack is a completely unsympathetic character. He's not a bad person, just totally amoral. He never seems to do anything because it's the right thing to do; he just does whatever he wants to do, justifying his actions with quasi-philosophical nonsense. I found myself hoping the police would actually get some proof he murdered his wife and put him away.

Still, I'm aware this is regarded as an extraordinary novel by literary types, and given that, it's probably worth a chance. There's a quote on the back from a review in Harper's that says, "A work of fierce concentration." If you can figure out what that means, you might also be able to figure out this book.

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.