ARGUMENTS
THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS
An American Dream
has been nearly as widely panned as it
has been widely reviewed, but in how many cases
has
it really been
read,
or, to put the best construction on it, read in book form rather than in the
Esquire
installments? A dazzling performance, a recklessly generous yet
disciplined exercise in self-exposure and self-invention, Mailer's latest
novel has
had
the further distinction of provoking a quaint resurgence
of neoclassical canons of taste. The strategy of attack has naturally bren
not entirely ineffective. It can't, after all, be denied that the novel sins
continuously against the rules of propriety and verisimilitude, and the
clarities of
bon sens.
So that by ignoring what Mailer has done, his
attackers have been able to have quite a time of it showing what he
should have done. Elizabeth Hardwick, in PR, announced that
An
American Dream
is "a very dirty book-dirty and extremely ugly."
And if we look for something closer to a reasoned argument in her
review, we find the curious logic that the story "is artless, unmysterious
and so there is no pain in it, no triumphant cruelty or instructive evil."
It's mysterious to
me
why mystery is necessary for pain, why cruelty
should
be
triumphant (over what? exactly how?) or evil instructive
(to make the reader a "better person"?), or indeed what relevance
such ideas about the novel have in what purports to be an account of
this
novel. Tom Wolfe, treating us once again to his special blend of
Wham-bang!
interjections and Compo Lit. pedantry, thinks that Rojack
is killed off with too much thinking in the first fourteen and a half
pages of the novel, complains of "unreal dialogue/' but finally concedes
that Mailer may one day be able to "climb into the same ring as
James M. Cain." For Joseph Epstein,
An American Dream,
"on any
level one chooses to read it" (?), is "confused and silly," and (shades
of English 223: Nineteenth-Century Realistic Fiction) he condemns
Mailer for being "more interested in the novel as a spectacle than as a
