28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dark Genius, August 16, 2004
This review is from: An American Dream (Paperback)
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.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Nightmarish read, January 30, 2000
This review is from: An American Dream (Paperback)
This is my first Mailer novel and i was worried that it would be boring and journalistic. But I was hugely surprised at how bizzare and subjective the imagery was - imagery which seizes upon the mind almost violently. The world of Stephen Rojack is drunken, amoral, and continually teetering between the shadowy, nightmarish underworld, and the respectable day to day world. This book in many ways does read as some awful dream, a dream in which the moon speaks to you, the ledge outside begs to be walked on as a test of courage, and murder is seen as some type of primitive, sexual release. Being somewhat sentimental I can only like a novel like this so much (I did not become attached to the characters, or want to immerse myself in the world of this novel), but that does not take away from the fact that this is a really enjoyable novel, even though I was almost relieved when I was finished. This book is like when you have an awful nightmare that keeps you up all night, and even though the nighmare terrified you, you cant help thinking about how interesting the images and mental landscape of the dream was. That being said I am definitely looking forward to more Mailer because he obviously has original talent.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A wonderfully sick satire., December 26, 2001
This review is from: An American Dream (Paperback)
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 a repulsive character as to be unfollowable and several postings on this site suggested that the narrative would be so congested with stream-of-consciousness discourse as to be unreadable. Well, Stephen Rojack may be a wife murdering, hard drinking, womanizing, sodomite, but he's the most charming character in the book and the manner in which he conveys his thoughts couldn't be more lucid and engaging than Philip Marlowe. This is a very consciously pulp novel that plays on comic book and hollywood conventions, a satirical nightmare that shouldn't be taken any more as fact than Hunter Thompson's maniacal binges in Las Vegas. The best way to imagine this book is to picture it as a stark, contrasty b+w movie directed by Stanley Kubrick from a script by Terry Southern. Sterling Hayden would be in the lead role and Liz Taylor would be the wife with Angie Dickinson as Cherry and Sammy Davis Junior as Shago and Lynn Redgrave as Ruta.
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