A SMALL PUBLIC NOTICE
An
American Dream
has received the best and worst re–
views of any book I've written . Now it is rumored that
Elizabeth Hardwick has written a bad review for
PRo
1
hasten to shudder. She is such a good writer.
I
also hasten
"For a good many years now
Norman Mailer has been making
a determined effort to exploit all
the resources of literary and social
outrageousness in order to im–
press himself in a major way on
the life and thought of his
time.... The fight he has carried
on has made almost superhuman
demands on his will power and
his courage; it has caused deep
erosion of his ego, even at those
moments when his ego has been
most insufferably in evidence;
and inevitably it has provoked
him to follies and excesses which
have done him and his work seri–
ous harm....
One could sense in both
Bar–
bary Shore
and
The Deer Park
that the main current of his
energy was trying to go else–
where. . _ . Deep within those
books one felt the pressure of
something big growing, a vision
or prophecy or simply a hatred
that was perhaps too radical and
disturbing to find embodiment in
the conventional forms of the
novel, perhaps too radical and
disturbing even for Mailer him–
self. ...
For a long time Mailer was
driven to seek easy and sensational
short cuts. . . . The essays . . .
seemed to be the only writing he
was able to do, and this struck
many people as an open admis–
sion that he had at last decided
he could not make it in an
im–
portant way as a novelist. . . .
But it was obvious to many
others that those essays contained
some of the best writing Mailer
had ever done, and that in them
he appeared to be coming into
possession of his true style, a style
that combined' the mean talk of
the hipster and the edgy rhetoric
of psychiatry into a prose instru–
ment as effective as a switchblade.
And it is this style, perfected in
that bleak period of foiled pros–
pects and compensatory bluster
and brag, which Mailer has now
in
An American Dream
been able
to use for the first time in a novel,
and use with a kind of confidence
and power he has never before
displayed. . . .
There will of course be readers
who will feel that
An American
Dream
represents not a break–
through but the final stage of
breakdown. For by conventional
standards it must seem an unpar–
donably ugly book, and taken in
terms of its story-basically about
a man who murders his wife and
almost gets away with it-a
grotesquely implausible book, full
of horrific occurrences and char-
AN AMERICAN DREAM
