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LEO BERSANI
convincing representation of life, more concerned with projecting
per–
sonal fantasies than creating verisimilitude."
Philip Rahv, writing in the
New York Review of Books,
manages
both to capture Miss Hardwick's moralistic tone (he complains of ROo
jack's being freed, by plot manipulation, "from paying any sort of
price for what he has done") and to echo Mr. Epstein's notions of
what a novel is supposed to do (the story lacks "verisimilitude, even
in the most literal sense." ) Finally, in a plot summary apparently
designed
to
show the uselessness of attempting a critical evaluation of
this "dreadful novel," Stanley Edgar Hyman unwittingly demonstrates
some of Mailer's marvelous humor and indifference to plot, and shows
in addition his own inability to cope with the difficulty of Mailer's
language and especially the exuberant inventiveness of his similes. Un–
fortunately, Mailer's defenders-with the notable exception of Richard
Poirier in
Commentary--seem
as anxious as his detractors to get away
from the book. John Aldrich, in an apocalyptic reading for
Life
which
Mailer had printed in PR to offset Miss Hardwick's scolding comments,
speaks of
An American Dream
as "a devil's encyclopedia of our secret
visions and desires, an American dream or nightmare"; Mailer, we are
told, has created "an image of our time which will undoubtedly stand
as authoritative for this generation." And Conrad Knickerbocker, adopt–
ing that flattening perspective from which the
Times
reassures its readers
that good books, good plays and good movies are never special or
particular but are always speaking to all of us about all our problems,
praises Mailer for searching for something called "the mana, that magics,
submerged and hideous, that move the age."
But the seriousness of
An American Dre,am
involves a denial of
certain kinds of novelistic seriousness, of social probability and relevance,
as well as of so-called intellectual depth. It is an intensely private novel,
and one key to what has offended or puzzled the reviewers is probably
in the way Mailer allows his hero to treat himself, in that peculiar
blend of self-concentration and self-deprecation which, in fact, largely
accounts for the originality of his language. The expectations of a
political novel which might
be
set up by the joke that begins the
story are rapidly destroyed. Mailer in
An American Dream
is somewhat
like Balzac in his attitudes toward social maneuvering and power: he
seems just as naively melodramatic in his notion of what goes on at the
top, and the images of political power in both novelists should
be
immediately recognizable as private mythologies expressing private
0b–
sessions and dreams of power ideally demonic. Both are impatient
with the specific strategies for gaining and keeping power, as distinct
