Norman Mailer's Yummy Rump

...He leaves the corpse on the carpet, goes downstairs and buggers the maid, who in her enthusiasm admits to being a Nazi, and tells him that he is absolutely a sexual genius...

...If you purge it, if you get sleep and tear it up in the morning, it can do no more harm than any other bad debauch...

...It particularly cannot convey the dreamy unreality of the conversation ("You black-ass ego," says Cherry sternly to Shago...

...Mailer's novel is bad in that absolute fashion that makes it unlikely that he could ever have written anything good...

...Some of them are Homeric, for example a passage that begins "Once, in a rainstorm, I witnessed the creation of a rivulet," and concludes six lines later: "That was how the tears went down Cherry's face...

...Synopsis cannot convey the unbelievability of the characters (Kelly, for example, seems based largely on Fu Manchu: he says "me" for "I," but asks "do you know that phrase of Kierkegaard's, of course you do—I was in a fear and trembling...

...Then he learns that his wife's murder has been declared a suicide as a result of his father-in-law's influence...

...The novel covers several days in the life of the narrator, Stephen Richards Rojack, a New Yorker in his early 40s...

...Like sitting to dinner in an empty castle with no more for host than a butler and his curse" is the single mysterious reference in the book to The Butler's Curse...

...Why didn't Mailer pitch the whole preposterous mess out the window...

...Some of the similes seem deranged...

...These are merely a few of the simpler strands in the plot...

...As soon as the detectives release him, Rojack goes to the club where Cherry sings, outfaces a burly prizefighter and takes Cherry home to bed...

...I was close to a strong old man dying now of his overwork" does not mean that an old man is dying near Rojack, in fact there is no old man...

...He is separated from his wife, a beautiful rich Roman Catholic of Hapsburg ancestry, Deborah Caughlin Mangaravidi Kelly...

...Before he cleanses himself by strangling Deborah, Rojack smells "like the rotten, carious shudder of a decayed tooth...

...I do not think that all of this is due to simple ineptness...

...It cannot convey the genteel double standard of the sex (sodomy is for servants), or the windy occultism that accompanies the sex acts (going to bed with Rojack must be like going to bed with Madame Blavatsky...

...Since its awfulness is really indescribable, instead of trying to describe it I will try to communicate its quality by allowing three of its constituents to represent the whole...

...Some of it surely represents Mailer's immortal longing, to be a big fancy writer like Thomas Wolfe...

...Deborah's smell is compounded of "sweet rot," "burning rubber," and "a bank...

...It is the bends of Hell...

...He returns to Cherry, who confesses to being a fan of his television program, and expresses her feeling for his talents by biting pieces of skin out of his ear...

...While they are engaged in mutual congratulations, Cherry's former lover, a gifted Negro singer and "stud" named Shago Martin, walks in on them...

...Full of vomit, self_pity, panic, paranoia, megalomania, merde, whimpers, excuses, turns of the neck, flips of the wrist, transports...

...The umbrella lay like a sleeping snake across my thighs...

...Rojack has powers of telekinesis and precognition...

...Other tropes are notable for their spit-on-the-Harvard-crimson vulgarity: "a delicious pain clean as a mistress' sharp teeth going 'Yummy' in your rump" is perhaps my favorite, although an orgasm "fierce as the demon in the eyes or a bright golden child" has a lot to recommend it...

...He pulls a switchblade on Rojack, but Rojack, unarmed, overcomes him, beats him up, and throws him down the stairs...

...Rojack arrives just I D time to hear her last words...

...He then drives to Las Vegas, where he is highly successful at the dice tables...

...The Nazi maid is now working for Kelly and simultaneously blackmailing him, and she tells Rojack that at the time of her death Deborah was involved with lovers high in American, Soviet, and British espionage circles...

...we know it is Heaven because "Marilyn says to say hello...

...These phrases should give some idea or Mailer's prose, which is additionally distinguished by poetic inversions ("Neat and clean was his shirt"), and sentences without a fig leaf of syntax ("Enormous, and stared at one with a clear luminous look, an animal's fright, some creature with huge eyes...

...Ganucci exudes "an essence of disease, some moldering from the tree of death...

...Instead of tearing it up in the morning, Mailer has now published it as An American Dream (Dial, 270 pp., $4.95...

...The most curious of these mystiques is the spirit odors that the characters emanate...

...This is Norman Mailer in Esquire not long ago, ostensibly talking about the work of a contemporary, but obviously telling us the genesis of his new novel...

...An American Dream is a dreadful novel, perhaps the worst I have read since beginning this column, since it is infinitely more pretentious than the competition...

...it is Mailer trying to say that Rojack feels poorly...

...She tells him that she was raised by an incestuous half-brother and half-sister, after which he succeeds in bringing her to the first orgasm she has ever experienced in genital intercourse...

...He goes back downtown and learns that Shago has been beaten to death by an unidentified assailant in Morningside Park, and Cherry has been beaten to death in her apartment by a confused friend of Shago's...

...Hot as the gates of an icy slalom" is one such...

...The Nazi maid has "a thin high constipated smell," as well she might...

...others are: "I cried within like a just-cracked vase might shriek for cement," which is ungrammatical in addition...

...and "with the insight of an ice pick the precise thought came to me.' Two woeful herpetological tropes suggest that Mailer has never seen a snake: Shago's switchblade "opened from his palm like a snake's tongue...

...Enough...

...Rojack begins the novel's action by a wrestling match with his wife, occasioned by her boasting of perversities with her lovers, in the course of which he strangles her...

...Shago's odor is "a poisonous snake of mood which entered my tangs like marijuana," later "a smell of full nearness as if we'd been in bed for an hour...

...Many of the similes are tritely romantic: "narrow and mean as the eye of a personnel director," "the look of a rock-hard little jockey recollecting an ugly race," "faint as the ghost of a jewel box...

...These are: its plot, its mystique of human smells, and its tropes...

...He was briefly a Congressman, and now makes his living as a professor of existentialist psychology at a city university, where he offers a seminar in Voodoo, and as master of ceremonies on a far-out television interview program...

...Others are excessively labored: "as if drunkenness were a train which rocketed through the dark and I was sitting in a seat which gave out backward on the view and so receded further and further from some fire on the horizon: thus came each instant nearer to the murmur one hears in the tunnel which leads to death...

...A pair of detectives give off, respectively, "a kind of clammy odor of rut," and "the funk a bully emits when he heads for a face-to-face meeting...

...Rojack was a hero in the Second World War, and is in fact "the one intellectual in America's history" with a Distinguished Service Cross...

...The similes, however, deserve special attention...

...Mailer's slovenly misuse of language creates nonexistent characters and stories...

...The next day there is another interview with the detectives, in the course of which Rojack defends himself so skillfully that he is told: "You missed a promising legal career...

...This has everything: turns of the neck, flips of the wrist, transports, merde, even an elegant Latioate plural...

...This piles up traffic on the East River Drive, and one of the cars involved contains Eddie Ganucci, a statesman in the Mafia, and a beautiful blonde nightclub singer named Cherry Melanie, who looks "like a child who has been anointed by the wing of a magical bird," and with whom Rojack promptly falls in love...

...Last night there must have been electricity burning in government offices all over the world,' she adds...

...The book is full of mystiques...

...Kelly compels Rojack to listen to his life story, spiced with father-daughter incest, and Rojack then demonstrates his courage (he intends "to blow up poor old Freud" by showing that cowardice is the root of neurosis) by walking a dangerous parapet near Kelly's terrace...

...While Rojack is at Kelly's, President Kennedy (called "Jack") telephones to express his condolences...

...Then he goes back upstairs, cleans his wife's corpse up a bit, and pitches it out the window...

...Rojack then goes to visit his father-in-law, the mysterious tycoon Barney Oswald Kelly, another former lover of Cherry's...

...there is a great deal of pajama-party demonology, including an encounter with "the most evil woman ever to live on the Riviera," who justifies the title by keeping a scorpion in a cage...

...I submit one further simile in evidence: "as if the terrors of men were about as admirable as the droppings of hippopotami...

...he is the author of one popular book, The Psychology of the Hangman...

...Cherry smells "of something sweet and strong," among its elements "the back seats of cars.' The principal detective smells "sour with use, and also too sweet...

...Kelly emits "some whiff of the icy rot and iodine in left to bleach on the sand,' a piece of marine nerve varied by "the stench which comes from devotion to the goat...

...the deaths of Shago and Cherry seem to be caused by a posthumous curse of Deborah's, which Rojack escaped by walking the parapet...

...Kelly tries to push him off the parapet with an umbrella, but Rojack smashes Kelly in the face with the umbrella and departs...

...The book ends with him telephoning Cherry in Heaven...

...Ask Esquire and Dial Press and Dell Books and Warner Brothers, which have guaranteed him half a million dollars for it...