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An American Dream Expanded/The Harbours of the Moon (Review): Difference between revisions
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''An American Dream''. Norman Mailer. Dial Press, New York. 1965. 270 pp. $4.95. | ''[[An American Dream]]''. Norman Mailer. Dial Press, New York. 1965. 270 pp. $4.95. | ||
This review is late. And with cause. | This review is late. And with cause. | ||
Perhaps the proper place to read An American Dream is in a jet airliner at 37,000 feet. Anyhow, that’s where I began it (going east to D.C) and where I finished it (going west to Tacoma). One knew at the beginning that reviewing it would be a job; the kind of job one would rather not do. | Perhaps the proper place to read ''An American Dream'' is in a jet airliner at 37,000 feet. Anyhow, that’s where I began it (going east to D.C) and where I finished it (going west to Tacoma). One knew at the beginning that reviewing it would be a job; the kind of job one would rather not do. | ||
Other reviewers would make it even tougher. Perhaps because the novel had been serialized in Esquire before the book was published, there was already a predatory scent on the air; the scent of animals prowling for a kill. Mailer invites such prowling, to be sure; he has always courted a bad press. Every year is “Jump-on-Norman-Year,” and one distrusts the seeming heedlessness of such a prey as much as the cats which stalk it. Finally, and most important, there was the novel itself: a violent, painfully probing work; its style a surreal combination of scalpel and bazooka. | Other reviewers would make it even tougher. Perhaps because the novel had been serialized in ''Esquire'' before the book was published, there was already a predatory scent on the air; the scent of animals prowling for a kill. Mailer invites such prowling, to be sure; he has always courted a bad press. Every year is “Jump-on-Norman-Year,” and one distrusts the seeming heedlessness of such a prey as much as the cats which stalk it. Finally, and most important, there was the novel itself: a violent, painfully probing work; its style a surreal combination of scalpel and bazooka. | ||
In the end, one decided it would have to wait. Let other reviewers have their say. Studiously avoid reading them. Let the novel and one’s ideas and impressions of it ferment slowly in some earthy cellar at the back of the mind. Check the brew periodically to see if it had deepened, taken on body. Finally, chill and serve. | In the end, one decided it would have to wait. Let other reviewers have their say. Studiously avoid reading them. Let the novel and one’s ideas and impressions of it ferment slowly in some earthy cellar at the back of the mind. Check the brew periodically to see if it had deepened, taken on body. Finally, chill and serve. | ||
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…as if you were in the pleasure chamber of an encampment on the moon. …You caught the odor of an empty space where something was dying alone. …The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric, and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high. I was not good enough to climb up and pull them down. So I walked out into the desert where the mad before me had come. … | …as if you were in the pleasure chamber of an encampment on the moon. …You caught the odor of an empty space where something was dying alone. …The night before I left Las Vegas I walked out in the desert to look at the moon. There was a jeweled city on the horizon, spires rising in the night, but the jewels were diadems of electric, and the spires were the neon of signs ten stories high. I was not good enough to climb up and pull them down. So I walked out into the desert where the mad before me had come. … | ||
Who are the mad who have preceded Rojack into the desert? Traditionally, the desert suggests the place or penance, of contemplation, to which the prophets have gone and whence they came. Too, it suggests, by its conjunction to the “jeweled city” of pleasure, that An American Dream is a radically moral book, a jeremiad against those forces within and without man which foster his perversion and the corrosion of his ideals. | Who are the mad who have preceded Rojack into the desert? Traditionally, the desert suggests the place or penance, of contemplation, to which the prophets have gone and whence they came. Too, it suggests, by its conjunction to the “jeweled city” of pleasure, that ''An American Dream'' is a radically moral book, a jeremiad against those forces within and without man which foster his perversion and the corrosion of his ideals. | ||
One quarrel with Mailer, if we wish to make one on legitimate grounds, must come, it seems to me, not with respect to the almost unrelieved pessimism of his view of American life; not with his style (for it is powerful, contemporary in the best sense, and never dull; perhaps the best in America at the moment); not with his conception of the character or the jaggedness of his plot; but with the weakness of the ending of the novel. | One quarrel with Mailer, if we wish to make one on legitimate grounds, must come, it seems to me, not with respect to the almost unrelieved pessimism of his view of American life; not with his style (for it is powerful, contemporary in the best sense, and never dull; perhaps the best in America at the moment); not with his conception of the character or the jaggedness of his plot; but with the weakness of the ending of the novel. | ||
After what Rojack has gone through, and in view of what he is, it is simply not enough to pack him off in a car “to Guatemala and Yucatan.” For there is only the slightest suggestion of the meaning of Rojack’s action, and no suggestion at all of the significance of his destination. As it stands, An American Dream is Mailer’s best and most powerful novel since The Naked and the Dead, but it has neither a conclusion nor an ending. | After what Rojack has gone through, and in view of what he is, it is simply not enough to pack him off in a car “to Guatemala and Yucatan.” For there is only the slightest suggestion of the meaning of Rojack’s action, and no suggestion at all of the significance of his destination. As it stands, ''An American Dream'' is Mailer’s best and most powerful novel since ''[[The Naked and the Dead]]'', but it has neither a conclusion nor an ending. | ||
Robert Dana | Robert Dana | ||