ARGUMENTS
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involves an occasionally reckl'ess indifference to the probability of
his own experience. The telling of his story becomes
Rojack's
invention
as well as Mailer's once his life confronts him as choices to be made
about language and nOv'elistic form. The plot of
An American Dream
is,
therefore, nothing more than a mode of Rojack's inventive exuberance,
and, while it is perhaps understandable that the anecdotal aspect of
fiction should trick us most easily into confusions between art and
life, we should be admiring the power of extravagance in Rojack's tall
story instead of upholding the faded banner of verisimilitude. Rojack's
experience is largely a pretext for trying his hand at different ways
of telling a story: making love to Ruta is a calculated allegory of
good and evil, a parody of literary struggles between the Lord and the
Devil, but the sc'ene in the police station and Rojack's telephone calls
are masterful exercises in the art of realistic dialogue and psychological
detail. And much of the novel's humor is in the unexpected shifts
from one kind of writing to another: the conversation with Dr. Tharch–
man moves from intricate, understated satire to an exaggerated display
of
humour noir,
and some of the suspense of a spy story is brought in
just long enough to make us feel the greater importance of what is more
like a ghost story.
This free play of virtuosity in the narrative structure of
An
American Dream
also characterizes Rojack's similes, which the reviewers
have pounced on with a comical solemnity about stylistic propriety.
Mr. Hyman, in his outraged enumeration of the similes he hates most,
is only the most hilarious example of all those readers who have
declared with absolute seriousness that they have never thought of a
pigeon's breast when touching the trigger of a gun, or had an orgasm
"fierce as a demon in the eyes of a bright golden child." Novelists
themselves have, of course, been known to isolate their metaphors from
their style, to test each one for its individual "rightness" or "objective"
validity. Flaubert's maniacal search for a perfect equivalence between
image and a preexistent "subject" (a fear of style disguised as an
idolatry of style) probably accounts, to some degree, for
his
leaden
metaphors and the clumsiness of his rhythms. But Mailer
in
An
American Dream,
unlike Flaubert, never uses metaphor for the purpose
of arresting our attention, of making us stop to admire a tiny verbal
island, an exquisite
tmuvaille.
Rojack's similes
make
a self of enormous,
even fantastic imaginative range, and their power lies in a kind of
dialectical reference to, and denial of characters and events in the
novel. They change the story, as it is being told, into a challenge
to the resources of fantasy; their complexity is not in their farfetched
