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Title: An American Dream by Norman Mailer ISBN: 0-375-70070-6 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 04 May, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.19 (21 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Not my cup of tea
Comment: Reading An American Dream is sort of like reading Shakespeare; you eventually start wondering if people actually talked like that. Of course, the time period of this book is just a few decades ago (the early 1960s), so it's hard to believe they did. There's a conversation between main character Rojack and a jazz singer named Shago Martin that is almost completely nonsensical. The narration of the book (by Rojack) is not much better, filled with lines that sound profound until you actually think about them. Like this little gem:
"There was pain now in the sound, and such a truth in the grief that I knew she was crying not for Deborah, not even quite for herself, but rather for the unmitigatable fact that women who have discovered the power of sex are never far from suicide."
Uh... right. The other factor of this book that crippled my ability to enjoy it was the fact that Rojack is a completely unsympathetic character. He's not a bad person, just totally amoral. He never seems to do anything because it's the right thing to do; he just does whatever he wants to do, justifying his actions with quasi-philosophical nonsense. I found myself hoping the police would actually get some proof he murdered his wife and put him away.
Still, I'm aware this is regarded as an extraordinary novel by literary types, and given that, it's probably worth a chance. There's a quote on the back from a review in Harper's that says, "A work of fierce concentration." If you can figure out what that means, you might also be able to figure out this book.
Rating: 2
Summary: Not his best
Comment: I couldn't believe this is the author of "The Naked and the Dead", "Harlot's Ghost", and "The Executioner's Song"! I think for this book Mailer tried a little too hard to be "cool", "stylistic", whatever, and ended up looking like an unconvincing show-off. Not worth the trouble.
Rating: 2
Summary: Doesn't quite work
Comment: An American Dream is occasionally compelling, but it ultimately proves to be a messy train-wreck of a novel. Mailer heaps lurid details on top of a convoluted plot and an eccentric cast of characters who cross paths in unlikely ways, but the threads of the story never manage to pull together.
Stephen Rojack is an ex-politician, war hero, and public intellectual who murders his wife, and who in the aftermath goes on a bizarre rollercoaster through the gutters of Manhattan, a journey which leads him to some surprising revelations.
In reading An American Dream I often felt that the novel was a sort of experiment in Mailer's eyes; several elements appear that he would revisit in other novels. He again looks through the eyes of a killer in Executioner's Song, and he writes about spies, gangsters, and JFK again in the Harlot's Ghost, his excellent epic fictionalized story of the CIA.
There are a couple of sterling moments in which Mailer's skill as a writer shines. In the first, Rojack, the protagonist, recounts an experience rushing a German machine gun nest. Mailer does a perfect job of painting the out-of-body otherworldliness of the moment. The second occurs when Rojack approaches a woman in a bar and ends up in a tense standoff with the gangsters who are accompanying her. Both instances are excellently drawn sketches of violence, one carried out through action, the other threatened but unrealized.
A few strong passages notwithstanding, this is an unfocused under-edited novel full of opaque philosophizing and flat characters. An interesting experiment, but it doesn't quite work.
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Title: Advertisements for Myself by Norman Mailer ISBN: 0674005902 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: September, 1992 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Naked and the Dead : 50th Anniversary Edition by Norman Mailer ISBN: 0312265050 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 05 August, 2000 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams ISBN: 0872860175 Publisher: City Lights Books Pub. Date: July, 1991 List Price(USD): $5.95 |
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Title: Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs ISBN: 0802132952 Publisher: Grove Press Pub. Date: February, 1992 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer ISBN: 0375700811 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 28 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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