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{{notice|From {{cite news |last=Didion |first=Joan |date=April 20, 1965 |title=A Social Eye |url= |work=National Review |pages=329–330 |access-date= }}}}<br> | {{notice|From {{cite news |last=Didion |first=Joan |date=April 20, 1965 |title=A Social Eye |url= |work=National Review |pages=329–330 |access-date= }}}}<br> | ||
{{quote|“The essence of spirit, he thought to himself, was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous.” -''The Deer Park''}} | {{quote|“The essence of spirit, he thought to himself, was to choose the thing which did not better one's position but made it more perilous.” -''[[The Deer Park]]''}} | ||
Norman | Norman {{NM}}, Living Legend. Known to gangsters, known to Presidents, known to readers of the ''Daily News''. Wielder of the knife in the New York night. Actor in some national sexual fantasy. Candidate for Mayor, citizen-on-the-spot for civic improvement. Subject of the city’s morning chorus, offered up with careful nonchalance by people he does not recall: "''Nor''man dropped up, late, drunk of course.” “''Nor''man was there, and be''hav''ed ''bad''ly.” Norman Mailer, ''Tout-New York''. | ||
Let us try, for a moment, Norman Mailer, Novelist, a ''persona'' which many people who know ''Nor''man prefer to patronize. Mailer is challenged to “writing contests” by advertising copywriters, condescended to by the kind of people who refer to Joseph Heller as "an authentic voice,” deprecated by failed fashion models whose attention span for printed matter stops with the plane schedule to Montego Bay. He writes "a lot of the ''voodoo'' about ''cancer'',” reports the ''Herald Tribune's'' Writer of the Year. And if it had always been easy to laugh at Mailer, it was never easier than when he announced, clearly in trouble, running scared, that he had dared himself to write a novel in installments for ''Esquire''. ("Only a second-rater would take a stupid dare like that ,” as Lulu says in ''The Deer Park''.) Nonetheless, that novel, ''An American Dream'', is one more instance in which Mailer is going to laugh last, for it is a remarkable book, a novel in many ways as good as ''The Deer Park'', and ''The Deer Park'' is in many ways a perfect novel. | Let us try, for a moment, Norman Mailer, Novelist, a ''persona'' which many people who know ''Nor''man prefer to patronize. Mailer is challenged to “writing contests” by advertising copywriters, condescended to by the kind of people who refer to Joseph Heller as "an authentic voice,” deprecated by failed fashion models whose attention span for printed matter stops with the plane schedule to Montego Bay. He writes "a lot of the ''voodoo'' about ''cancer'',” reports the ''Herald Tribune's'' Writer of the Year. And if it had always been easy to laugh at Mailer, it was never easier than when he announced, clearly in trouble, running scared, that he had dared himself to write a novel in installments for [[w:Esquire (magazine)|''Esquire'']]. ("Only a second-rater would take a stupid dare like that ,” as Lulu says in ''The Deer Park''.) Nonetheless, that novel, ''[[An American Dream]]'', is one more instance in which Mailer is going to laugh last, for it is a remarkable book, a novel in many ways as good as ''The Deer Park'', and ''The Deer Park'' is in many ways a perfect novel. | ||
''An American Dream'' is about a New York celebrity. War hero, congressman, husband to an heiress, professor of existential philosophy, television personality, ''celebrity''. That is Stephen Rojack, whom we meet on the edge of something. “I was approaching my forty-fourth year,” he explains, “but for the first time I knew why some of my friends, and so many of the women I had thought I understood, could not bear to be alone at night.” In the thirty-some hours which follow he feels the pull of suicide, murders his wife, meets and falls in love with a singer named Cherry, witnesses Cherry's violent death, stands off the police, faces his father-in-law in the Waldorf Towers, discovers facts too dark to remember, and in the last few pages heads west, to Las Vegas, where "the sky was dark, the streets were light, the heat was a phenomenon.” In the 110° night he walks out alone onto the desert and makes a deranged call to the dead from a roadside telephone with a rusty dial. (A roadside telephone booth, the night, the heat. Imagine it: a glass booth, with a light that goes on when the door closes, the only light on that desert road. Did Rojack close the door? He does not say. Just that he dialed, and asked for Cherry. That telephone booth alone is worth the whole of a couple of dozen of Mailer’s contemporaries; it is distinctly the real thing.) He thinks he might make the call again, “but in the morning, I was something like sane again, and packed the car, and started on the long trip to Guatemala and Yucatán.” | ''An American Dream'' is about a New York celebrity. War hero, congressman, husband to an heiress, professor of existential philosophy, television personality, ''celebrity''. That is Stephen Rojack, whom we meet on the edge of something. “I was approaching my forty-fourth year,” he explains, “but for the first time I knew why some of my friends, and so many of the women I had thought I understood, could not bear to be alone at night.” In the thirty-some hours which follow he feels the pull of suicide, murders his wife, meets and falls in love with a singer named Cherry, witnesses Cherry's violent death, stands off the police, faces his father-in-law in the Waldorf Towers, discovers facts too dark to remember, and in the last few pages heads west, to Las Vegas, where "the sky was dark, the streets were light, the heat was a phenomenon.” In the 110° night he walks out alone onto the desert and makes a deranged call to the dead from a roadside telephone with a rusty dial. (A roadside telephone booth, the night, the heat. Imagine it: a glass booth, with a light that goes on when the door closes, the only light on that desert road. Did Rojack close the door? He does not say. Just that he dialed, and asked for Cherry. That telephone booth alone is worth the whole of a couple of dozen of Mailer’s contemporaries; it is distinctly the real thing.) He thinks he might make the call again, “but in the morning, I was something like sane again, and packed the car, and started on the long trip to Guatemala and Yucatán.” | ||