Nightmarish Mailer
Muste, John M.
Nightmarish Mailer An American Dream, by Norman Mailer. Dial Press. $5.95. Reviewed by John M. Muste Norman Mailer's fourth novel, An American Dream, is less a dream than a nightmarish melange...
...The survival of this vigorous and engaging talent makes it impossible to pass anything like a final judgment on Mailer's career...
...The talent is still there...
...It is true that his novels have progressively declined since The Naked and the Dead...
...an intelligent but tired cop, who knows the hero is guilty but is too busy to prove it...
...His material is tawdry and his handling of it is often sleazy, but Mailer makes it seem interesting, handling the popular slangy conversational style with more relish and vigor than anyone else around...
...But Mailer is not getting any younger, nor do his artistic principles seem to be getting any higher...
...Yet, his talent for reaching out and grabbing the reader has not diminished, and the possibility remains that this talent may find a subject worthy of it...
...The tragedy is that Mailer should be content now to publish anything so unsatisfactory...
...Mailer gives it life and meaning, and I would rather read a terrible book by a real writer than a dozen critical successes written by popular hacks...
...If this should happen, An American Dream will be no more significant in Mailer's career than Pylon was in Faulkner's...
...The burden is not eased by Mailer's indulgence of his less fortunate mannerisms...
...a most improbable challenge to death when the hero balances on the wall of an apartment balcony high above the street, and evades his father-in-law's attempt to push him off...
...a sadistic brawl between the hero and his true love's former lover, a Negro...
...Whatever his reason, Mailer's new novel contains a number of edifying features: a hero-narrator who murders his wife and gets away with it...
...At the moment, in the absence of any evidence that he is finding his way toward a genuine subject or the sell-discipline that would enable him to recognize and do justice to such a subject, An American Dream is nothing more than another scrap of evidence of how quickly a writer can be destroyed by our culture...
...Worst of all, the narration shows occasional signs of a Spillane influence...
...And yet, and yet...
...Reviewed by John M. Muste Norman Mailer's fourth novel, An American Dream, is less a dream than a nightmarish melange of the cliches of contemporary fiction...
...The book is pretentious, overwrought, sloppy, and cheap...
...The plot of An American Dream, if such a term is possible here, is straight out of Mickey Spillane, as are many of the actions...
...In the hands of a Herbert Gold or a Thomas Berger, the style wears thin quickly...
...It will probably sell well, certainly better than any Mailer novel since The Naked and the Dead, and he should make carloads of money on the movie sale...
...the hero's discovery of "real love" with a soiled, gutsy girl who is, despite her problems, capable of a "genuine" sexual relationship but who is unfortunately killed because of a misunderstanding...
...the hero's father-in-law who is, apparently, both a power in The Organization, perhaps the power, and an influence in the Central Intelligence Agency...
...the realization that the father-inlaw has been the lover of all of the hero's women...
...if the word "some" and its derivations, especially "something," were removed from the language, Mailer would have to begin all over again in a different language...
...Perhaps he should anyway, for this is a miserable production for any writer of talent...
...Mailer has apparently decided to forget about probabilities and to produce instead a Northern Gothic novel, perhaps motivated by the commercial success enjoyed by his friend Calder Willing-ham's venture into the Southern Gothic...
Vol. 29 • February 1965 • No. 2
