lOOKS
death is OK to the police. It seems she had a thing for secret agents and
was
herself mixed up with them.
What can have been Mailer's intention in this novel? The characters
cannot really
be
looked at because they are almost classically unconvinc–
ing-tough rich girls,
sexy
New York playboy, the usual cops.
An Ameri–
can
Dream
is
not a parody; one of its oddities is that there is very little
humor in it. Perhaps, Mailer meant by his sadistic eroticism to write
something like those "crimes" in Sade. But the perverse power Sade has
over the erotic impulse of the reader comes from his fanatical involve–
ment in his own fantasies. There is in Mailer none of the concentration
that would make "good" pornography. He seems, instead, tired, dis–
tracted, vengeful-and what is fatal for the perverse writer, to be merely
showing off, preten,ding. The incredibly poor quality of the composition,
the incoherent mixing of cheap effects pulls almost every page down into
fatuity. Consider the description of Deborah:
That was love with Deborah and it was separate from making
love to Debor<l;h; no doubt she classified the two as Grace and
Lust. When she felt love, she was formidable; making love she
left you with no uncertain memory of having passed through a
carnal transaction with a caged animal. It was not just her
odor, that smell (with the white gloves off) of the wild boar
full of rut, that hot odor from the gallery of the zoo, no, there
was something other, her perfume perhaps, a hint of sanctity,
something as calculating and full of guile as high finance, that
was it-she smelled like a bank.
This passage-and it is not untrue to the composition of the book
as
a whole-gives the clues to Mailer's failure. Carelessness, indifference
and some inexplicable distance from the characters produce "the white
gloves off' as an image for day-to-day respectable, deceptive life; pre–
tentiousness and again indifference mix Grace and Lust, and the fumes
of the zoo with sanctity. Of course we don't accept any of it because
we
have not seen or felt any sanctity in Deborah and so the image offends
more than the wild boar's rutting, which we recognize as a trick from
pornography, where the waning lustfulness of the male is always being
pepped up
by
the imposition of wild, jungle insatiability on the part of
the female. Every kind of banality meets in this short description of
Deborah: banalities of expression as much as of feeling. She is the center
of
the novel's action, the object of Rojack's lengthy speculation, the whole
reason, we feel, for the book itself. And she is either lamely generalized,
or preposterously unconvincing.
Mailer's attention has never been fully given to this novel. His
in-
