An American Dream Expanded/Major Reviews for a Major Novel

From the New York Times, 1965.

“ 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 Mailer 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. ” — John W. Aldridge, Life

“ A sometimes bizarre, always violent, absolutely contemporary story of evil, death, and strange hope . . . late at night, dozing over the front page or on a crowded street, one confronts the full menace of what Mailer describes. Beneath the glare of events, An American Dream beats with the pulse of some huge night carnivore. It defines the American style by presenting the most extreme of our realities—murder, love and spirit strangulated, the corruption of power and the powerful, the sacrifice of self to image—all of it mixmastered in booze and heat-and-serve sex, giving off the smell of burning rubber to the sound of sirens . . . Mailer manhandles the reader straight through the plate glass into the center of the event . . . I think he is one of the few really interesting writers anywhere. ” — Conrad Knickerbocker, in a front page review, N.Y. Times Book Review

“ Mailer is surely one of the most vigorous of contemporary writers. For the sheer rhetoric of its prose, An American Dream rises above most other current novels . . . There are few American novelists today writing with such vigor, and there are individual scenes of enormous power . . . Such scenes may very well suggest that the literary pledge of The Naked and the Dead, so long unfulfilled, has at last been redeemed. ” — Paul R. Jackson, in a front page review, Chicago Tribune, Books Today