FIXES FOR FICTION
BAD BOY
AN AMERICAN DREAM.
By
Norman Mailer. Dial. $4.95.
An American DMam
by Nonnan Mailer is a fantasy of venge–
ful murder, callous copulations and an assortment of dull cruelties. It is
an
intellectual and literary disaster,
poorly
written, morally foolish and
intellectually empty. Must we, backing away from the hole this new
novel represents, remind ourselves once more how good a journalist
Mailer has been elsewhere; must we bring up again his Sonny Liston
piece,
his
'archetypal paranoia about the Kennedys, his brilliant account
of the Goldwater Convention? Yes, it is well to have at hand the con–
solation of his cameo WASPS with their "five-year subscription to
Reader's Digest
and
National Geographic,
high colonics and arthritis,
silver-rimmed spectacles, punched-out bellies, and that air of controlled
schizophrenia which is the merit badge for having spent one's life on
Main Street." Bear in mind the squalid humor of "The Time of her
Time" and "The Man who Studied Yoga." Remember the white Negroes
and
the old starlets on producer's laps in
Deer Park.
We have always
said to ourselves that NO MATTER WHAT Mailer had humor, a free,
radical
spirit, and remarkable literary gifts.
Where have they gone? At the moment we have only a bombed–
out talent, scraping in the ashes.
An American Dream
is a very dirty
book-dirty and extremely ugly. It is artless, unmysterious and
so
there is
no pain in it, no triumphant cruelty or instructive evil. Begin with the
title. "An American dream" promises our national unconscious surprised
in
sleep. The phrase is used to signify the aspirations of the immigrant
and
so there is a briefly echoing irony. Our hero's aspiration is the
strangulation of a pop-fiction heiress wife, a poor unreal creature brought
to
rest in her own filth for reasons known only to the odor- and anal–
obsessed author. The dreamer has come to bring us noxious fornications,
to
vomit our cocktails, to
bear
the world's orgastic bites and bruises,
to
trade wisecracks with the cops. The hero is Stephen Richards Rojack:
Harvard, war hero, Phi Bete, professor of existential psychology (author
of "the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread and the perception of
