An American Dream Expanded/Major Reviews for a Major Novel: Difference between revisions

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{{DISPLAYTITLE:''An American Dream'' Expanded/Major Reviews for a Major Novel}}
{{DISPLAYTITLE:''An American Dream'' Expanded/Major Reviews for a Major Novel}}
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From the ''New York Times'', 1965.
From the ''New York Times'', 196-.


{{cquote|The novel explores, in what will surely be called morbid and salacious detail, the possibilities, not for damnation, but for salvation to be found in some of the most reprehensible acts known to our society — murder, suicide, incest, fornication and physical violence. But it is the expression of a devastatingly alive and original creative mind at work in a language capable of responding with seismographic sensitivity to an enormously wide range of impressions. There seems to be no limit to what {{NM}} is now suddenly able to do with words, particularly in recording the physical and psychological realities of people as they impinge up on the mind of a man constantly flagellating himself to new heights of awareness. In fact, it is possible to say that Mailer has developed a prose idiom of richer sensitivity to the exact condition of contemporary consciousness than any we have had in fiction since the best work of Faulkner.|author=John W. Aldridge|source=''[[The Big Comeback of Norman Mailer|Life]]''}}
{{cquote|The novel explores, in what will surely be called morbid and salacious detail, the possibilities, not for damnation, but for salvation to be found in some of the most reprehensible acts known to our society — murder, suicide, incest, fornication and physical violence. But it is the expression of a devastatingly alive and original creative mind at work in a language capable of responding with seismographic sensitivity to an enormously wide range of impressions. There seems to be no limit to what {{NM}} is now suddenly able to do with words, particularly in recording the physical and psychological realities of people as they impinge up on the mind of a man constantly flagellating himself to new heights of awareness. In fact, it is possible to say that Mailer has developed a prose idiom of richer sensitivity to the exact condition of contemporary consciousness than any we have had in fiction since the best work of Faulkner.|author=John W. Aldridge|source=''[[The Big Comeback of Norman Mailer|Life]]''}}
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{{cquote|Now he is . . . the Champ . . . Only the American language could handle the American nightmare, and here it is, the language American writers have worked toward for years, dirty and soaring, rutty and compound, with Europe’s fine meals and museums and concentration camps behind it, with Faulkner and Hemingway and Dick Tracy behind it, with almost everyone behind it . . . He has built out of the madness, the total disconnection, of our national life, a tough, tight structure of ideas and images that is exhausting but explanatory, that elucidates the mysteries even as it deepens them . . . Years ago Mailer pointed like Babe Ruth and nobody believed him. In this novel he gets the ball over the fence at last.|author=Richard Rhodes|source=''Kansas City Star''}}
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{{cquote|''An American Dream'' is Mailer’s most remarkable achievement . . . Like an ancient tragedy it is a work of fierce concentration . . . It centers on a domestic crime which is also dynastic, a crime of passion which is also political . . . It is an American Dream as ''Oedipus the
King'' is a Greek dream . . . a dramatization of those possibilities in ourselves that we starve to shadows in our waking hours and that return to raven us in our dreams . . . Though the idiom of the novel is perfectly, and often brilliantly, realistic, the atmosphere is mythic. The
encounters take place on the brink . . . the states of mind are extreme, rendered with an extraordinary, almost unbearable immediacy.|author=Paul Pickerel|source=''Harper’s''}}
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{{cquote|Here are the scenes of rare fictional quality one has come to expect from Mailer’s vision: the malevolent lilt of the Negro crooner’s colloquy, the clarity and drive of the police station scenes; the father-in-law’s immeasurably evil monologue; and a lyric, loving scene—heralding a mellower Mailer—between Rojack and his step-daughter, Deirdre . . . Mailer throws everything into his Saturnalian cathartic . . . to trouble all who are cloyed as Rojack and Mailer are by the sweet, sick narcotic of 20th-century life.|source=''Newsweek''}}
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Revision as of 17:44, 18 April 2019

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This page is part of
An American Dream Expanded.


From the New York Times, 196-.

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