BY NORMAN MAILER
to furnish her for company a review by John Aldridge
which appeared in
Life.
I cannot pretend I was displeased
to see it there, but Tm nearly ,as satisfie.d to see it here,
cut only to fit the space, even if I pay for the pleasure.
acters who appear to be uniform–
ly insane. But the events and peo–
ple it concerns have nothing to
do with its literary quality except
perhaps
to
remind us that fiction
in our day has become more and
more creation, not of the realities
we
think
we know, but of our fan–
tasy life, the far more compelling
realities which we occasionally
dare to imagine. Seen in this way,
the book can be recognized as a
novel of the most advanced kind,
a devil's encyclopedia of our se–
cret visions and desires, an Ameri–
can dream or nightmare. ' . ' .
The novel explores, in what will
surely
be
called morbid and sala–
cious detail, the possibilities, not
for damnation, but for salvation
to be found in some of the most
reprehensible acts known to our
society-murder, suicide, incest,
fornication and physical violence.
It
dramatizes the various ways a
man may sin in order to be saved,
consort with Satan in order to
attain to God, become holy as well
as whole by restoring the primi–
tive psychic circuits that enable
him
to live in harmony with him–
self and find his courage, regard–
less of whether his courage seeks
its test in the challenges of love or
the temptation
to
murder, wheth–
er he ends by becoming saint or
DIAL PRESS
$4.95
psychopath. It is, in short, a radi–
cally moral book about radically
immoral subjects, a religious book
that transcends the conventional
limits of blasphemy to expose the
struggle toward psychic redemp–
tion which is the daily warfare of
our hidden outlaw selves....
It
is
the expression of a devas–
tatingly alive and original creative
mind at work in a language cap–
able of responding with seismo–
graphic sensitivity to an enormous–
ly wide range of impressions. ...
In fact, it is possible to say that
Mailer has developed a prose
idiom of richer sensitivity to the
exact condition of contemporary
consciousness than any we have
had in fiction since the best work
of Faulkner. And he has managed
through that idiom to create an
image of our time which will un-
. doubtedly stand as authoritative
for this generation.
D. H. Lawrence once said that
'the world doesn't fear a new
idea. It can pigeonhole any idea.
But it can't pigeonhole a real new
experience.'
An American Dream
is such a new experience. In fact,
it may well represent the first
significant step the current Ameri–
can novel has taken into fresh
territories of the imagination."
