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eliZABETH HARDWICK
death were the roots of motivation")-and TV star. Rojack begins
his
story with the exhausted Mailer-Kennedy joke: "I met Jack Kennedy
in November, 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us
had
been elected to Congress. We went out one night on a double date
and
it turned out to be a fair evening for me. I seduced a girl who would
have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz."
The forebodings of the beginning are sustained throughout the
book,
except for a few brilliant diversions, such
a:s
a scene with the Negro
singer, Shago, that do most movingly testify to Mailer's old power.
Perhaps it is the very environment of this new novel that so viciously
betrays. The environment is made up of a crippling wife-hatred, degrad–
ing sexual boasting, and a determination to produce a novel, to
gain
or regain power thereby. (The inability to write a novel has been one
of Mailer's themes.) Somehow these private obsessions would take
on
significance, tell us about ourselves, expose the wife-killer in
every
husband. The excremental, the sadistic, the hiqeous would frighten us
into self-knowledge-and so on. How strange it is, though, that ugly
and mean-spirited as this book is, no heat arises from its many brutal
couplings, no real sense of danger from the heedless cruelty. You do
not feel confronted with some unpleasant but original force. What ap–
pears is an uglier, smellier pop-fiction. This, in the end, is the shock of
An American Dream.
Stephen Rojack kills his wife, Deborah, with
~
crack, crack, crack
of her neck.
If
you look for the motivation of the murder, you will find
it written in the cement of a typical speculation, such as the f(mowing:
"I hated her more than not by now, my life with her had been a series
of successes cancelled by quick failures, and I knew so far as I could
still keep any confidence that she had done her best to birth each loss,
she was an artist at sucking the marrow from a broken bone, she worked
each side of the 'Street with a skill shared only in common by the best of
street-walkers and the most professional of heiresses." Rojack strangles
his wife and then throws her body out of the window of her plush(sic)
East Side apartment. But while the body is still on the floor, he seduces,
in a particularly loathsome and ridiculous scene, the German maid:
"... as abruptly as an arrest, a thin, high constipated smell (a
smell
which spoke of rocks and grease and the sewer-damp of wet stones in
poor European alleys) came needling its way out of her." Then there
is the singer, Cherry, friend of gangsters, and some cops and more and
more of the same. Rojack does not have to bear any responsibility for
the murder of his wife because his story of her suicide is made more
plausible by the discovery that she had cancer--and also because her
