PARTISAN REVIEW
15
among serious young students of literature who have a surer instinct
for what it offers than have most of Mailer's critics. The always
outmoded criteria of verisimilitude, the accusations that the charac–
terization of Rojack is the occasion merely for a vulgar ego trip
by Mailer, the charge that the book is simply dirty and that it fails
for not making the hero pay for the crime of murder - these ac–
cusations sound primitive enough for hill-country journalism of a by–
gone era, but they happen to have been sponsored by, among others,
Philip Rahv, Elizabeth Hardwick and Tom Wolfe, who complains
of "unreal dialogue" as
if
there is such a thing as "real" dialogue.
Even to evoke criteria of this kind betrays an inability to see what
such a book is about, and I mention these criticisms only because
they represent the persistence of standards - and there are of course
many young pseudoneoclassicists coming through the ranks - which
continue to keep discussions of Mailer at an irrelevant and demean–
ing level even when some sympathetic critics set about to defend
him.
Oddly enough, it is just because it does call for the kind of
negative response it has mostly gotten that
An American Dream
is
such a brilliant achievement. From the first sentence the novel lays a
proprietary claim on the so-called real world, and even Tom Wolfe
ought to have found the dialogue of the police or a Mafia don, like
Gannuchi, "real" enough. Within a couple of paragraphs we learn
that Rojack went to Harvard (so did Mailer) ; that Rojack met Ken–
nedy (Mailer did, too, though under quite different circumstances) ;
that Rojack ran for Congress and won (while Mailer's first effort
to run for Mayor of New York had already floundered) ; that Rojack
killed his wife (Mailer had recently stabbed his second). Both were
for a time held by the police; they are roughly the same age, Rojack
44 and Mailer at the time of writing, 41; Rojack is half and Mailer
all Jewish; and both pursue the same topic - as writers and televi–
sion personalities - namely that "magic, dread, and the perception
of death were the roots of motivation."
This
mixture of history and fiction, of the author's with the
hero's biography, of Melvillian metaphysical rhetoric with social talk
as vividly "authentic" as any in Philip Roth or in the best of the
detective fiction which Mailer sometimes imitates, the adhesion of
interior fantasizing to moments of strenuously cool public etiquette -
these are frequent enough in literature to have become nearly the
