Customer Reviews

An American Dream

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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 to him. He murders his wife, rapes the maid and falls for a whore: the only woman he has sympathy for. The only female character he doesn't molest is the teenage step-daughter. Mailer is sometimes verbose in a juvenile attempt at poetry. The conclusion is predictable. Recommend only as a case study in bad American literature.

Stephen Rojack is (in the words of the publisher's blurb) a decorated war hero, a former Congressman and a certified public intellectual with his own television show. He is also a murderer. One night, in a drunken rage, he murders his estranged wife Deborah and then, pausing only to have sex with her German maid Ruta, pitches her body out of the window of her flat to make her death look like suicide. The police have their suspicions about Rojack, but cannot actually prove his involvement in his wife's death, and he is never charged with any crime. (That doesn't say a lot for the state of forensic science in the sixties). The rest of the book is taken up with Rojack's late-night Odyssey though the New York underworld, his relationship with a singer-cum-prostitute named Cherry and his bizarre interview with his father-in-law, Deborah's immensely wealthy father Barney Kelly.

The title "An American Dream" is deliberately ambiguous. On the one hand it refers- ironically- to the patriotic ideology of the "American dream", the idea that it is America, of all the countries in the world, which provides its citizens with the optimum conditions for the pursuit of happiness. On the other hand, it could be that Mailer intended his title to be interpreted quite literally, to suggest that Rojack's adventures never took place outside his imagination, that they are no more than a drink-fuelled hallucination. Certainly, the writing does at times take on a weird, nightmarish quality, a quality heightened by Mailer's lengthy, intricate, swirling and frequently obscure sentences. It is certainly suggested that Rojack is on the verge of madness; early in the book, before Deborah's murder, he hears the moon urging him to kill himself. The moon, of course, is frequently associated with insanity, hence the etymological link between "lunar" and "lunatic".

There are certain similarities with Hemingway's work. The prose styles of the two writers are very different (Hemingway generally being much terser), but Mailer is clearly writing in the same tradition of literary machismo. The book is written in the first person, with the world seen through the eyes of Rojack himself. This is a very male-oriented world; women generally enter into Rojack's life either as his bitter enemies (Deborah) or as sources of sexual gratification (Ruta, Cherry).

The book was immensely controversial when it was first published in the mid sixties, not only among the sort of conservatives who disapproved of any literary treatment of sex and violence but also because of Mailer's attitude to women. He adopts a deliberately amoral position towards Rojack's crime, which is never explicitly condemned. Rojack himself never expresses any remorse or regret at his wife's death; his only concern, apart from sex with Ruta, is to try and ensure that the blame does not fall on him. In earlier decades there was an unofficial literary convention that fictitious criminals, just as much as real-life ones, had to be seen to pay for their misdeeds, but in the sixties this was breaking down.

The book clearly has its admirers- the majority of those who have reviewed it here have awarded it either four or five stars- but I, quite frankly, loathed it. The theme of violent or sexual crimes committed by males against females is a difficult one, but there are male writers who have covered the topic well. Examples that come to mind are Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita" and John Fowles's "The Collector". Both those works are, like "An American Dream", first-person narratives, and both Nabokov and Fowles allow their anti-heroes Humbert Humbert and Frederick Clegg to condemn themselves out of their own mouths.

"An American Dream" is not in the same class. It is a lurid celebration of violence with a nasty streak of misogyny running throughout. The repulsive Rojack's pseudo-philosophical meanderings read less like self-condemnation than self-justification. He wants to blame everyone but himself; Deborah's death is either her own fault (he paints her as an obnoxious harridan) or that of society in general, a society which both Rojack and Mailer see as sick, although there is no meaningful analysis of that sickness or of the social causes of violence. No amount of protest against the crushing banality of society can justify the taking of another person's life. It is hardly surprising that the feminist critic Kate Millett called this book "an exercise in how to kill your wife and be happy ever after."

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.")

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!