An American Dream

by Norman Mailer

Book Overview

Stephen Rojack is a decorated war hero, a former Congressman, and a certified public intellectual with his own television show. He is also married to the very rich, very beautiful, and utterly amoral... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375700706
• ISBN13: 9780375700705
• Release Date: May 1999
• Publisher: Vintage Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

I 've listened about 12 times in the car

I never get tired of this book by Norman Mailer as read by MacDonald Carey. He has a great voice and a great acting style that make you see the book in your head like a movie! I am not kidding, sometimes I forget it was a book and think I saw this movie! I protect this tape like the special item it is. If you like the dark side, you'll like this book very much.

Dark Genius

Mailer's meditation on violence and evil will not be everyone's idea of a good novel to read on the beach, but "An American Dream" is a brilliantly realized fantasy wherein one set-upon, White alcoholic protagonist berserks himself into a series of delirium fueled rages to rid himself of the crushing banality of the culture that he feels is killing him by the inch. To do this, he commits a series of violent and insane acts , in an alcoholic haze, challenges sent him by the moon (really) whose successful completion might give him a hint of the freedom he dreams is beyond the neon-lit tarp of the Manhattan skyline. This pilgrim's progress is nothing short of an obscene fantasy, wherein our hero, a decorated war hero, former congressman and talk show host, strangles his maddening estranged wife, buggers the German maid, steals a Mafia don's girl friend, and proceeds, in 24 hours, to lie and deceive the New York City Police Department, the Mob, with intimations that the FBI and CIA are involved invisibly in the mess he created. The plot, of course, is lurid , absurd and the product of a particular time, but Mailer's novel comes at a time when the Hemingway cult of quiet, manly stoicism managed through a singular, privately held code of honor was exhausted of compelling narrative potential.Mailer's idea was to see what would happen if the man who might have been the Hemingway hero, suffering his hurts in some poetic privacy, had instead a psychotic break. Gone, we see, are the hard-carved minimalism of the Hemingway style, with Mailer offering a delirious metaphorical ride through the ugly side of individual realization. His character, Stephen Rozack, is akin to King Lear in the rain, gone insane precisely because he no longer has the stagings guiding his eye and thinking. In the clutch of his tantrums, the world finally seems to pull back its shroud and reveal the shape and purring function of its true nature; Rozack sees cities of diamonds, rains of falling stars, he smells and tastes those things never served on a plate. Mailer's great chains of metaphors deliver a dissolving sensibility that sees, fleetingly, the way everything is connected ,the hand of an anonymous God directing His actors in ways unannounced and never explained. Rid of the props and story lines, there is nothing left, an emptiness that can only be filled with increasing amounts of destruction. This is a riveting , wild, and enthralling exploration into the romanticizing of prescriptive violence. Troubling, agitated, problematic for great numbers of readers,a brilliant novel despite its flaws.It may be even because of the flaws--the unreal dialogue, the haphazard cramming of a week's worth of events into a single 24 hour period--that bring the long runs of sentences shriek and burn so splendidly, as there is the sense Roszak's state is a dream within which he must confront and conquer every blatant and disguised dread. The crash and slam of the plot dynamics--bare in mi

-

God.. i'm so tired of reading posts that endlessly and pedantically harp-on mailer's philosophizing, and theorizing and wordage - both his number and style, calling finally to his use of "mumbo-jumbo" or mystic insights; far-out or nihilism/debauchery depicting imagery and symbolism to debunk him. Yes, his sentences are overlong; yes he can be overblown and fancy; yes, he's a cool cat with a self-styled poet's reputation to prove. Overwrought, overcooked metaphors abound. Fusillades of words come out of no where. He's an onslaught and sensory overload; and his prose is charged with an almost psychopathic zeal/fervor. But that's the point. Remove any of that from the question, the mania of his style, and you topple the foundation of one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. And if you don't like this book for the aforementioned reasons, try to read his Armies of the Night, a pulitizer prize winner, quite a contrast to his other pulitzer prize winner, Exe's Son, which is very economically and even stoicly written. in E. S., Mailer writes with the detached eye of the scientific observer, the objective, unimposing journalist, cataloging and chronicaling a nearly recoved ex-con's slow descent with a befriending family into a murdering rage. It's a spit in the eye at the stifling effects of american conventionality. But it's spit that needs no embellishment, no elaboration. The argument is there implicitly. Nothing needs to be added or tacked on, there is no rabble-rousing, no polemic or paen to the evils or the goods of prison and the manifestly holy image of "prisoner" established in Mailer's philosophical vocabulary. He's impossibly restrained. None of his personality is present at all. But in his first foray into nonfiction, his verbose tendencies return, and some of the phases he uses, "burgeoning meat" for example, to describe high-schoolers, smile-faced and bouncing around in the back of a school bus, is a bit overdone. But we live in an age where concision and snappiness of expression has come to supersede and override in importance the need to be beautiful. Our own industrial efficency has become our partner in literary efficency. We don't read linearly, we don't care about the substantive interdependency of words, we don't look for paragraphs that have a certain tensile neatness, where not a single word can be removed or added. We want essences. We want the trees without the ornaments. We want variety, diversity offered up in pill-sized portions, so that we can maximize our multicultural apprecation. We want that. Not probing philosophical mediations on - in contemporary terms - outdated social figures: the seemingly ordinary man, snapping and killing his wife (mailer called marriage an "excrementious relatioship". The two parties sling feces at one another. The marriages that last are the ones which survive on the brink of maddening vindictiveness and intensity.)It's important that I mention marriage

Gripping Masterpiece

I've read this book in September, and I must say that despite some obvious Dostoevsky elements, it stands out as one of the brilliant commentaries on high society of New York in the 1960s. Master Mailer has once again proven after two previous mediocre novels that he can infuse passion and brilliance into his fiction. Master Mailer also brilliantly weaves together the famous stabbing incident of Adele (his second wife) and his existential fascination with violence and the underground world of hipsters to expose layers of flaw within the American society of the day. That the plot begins with a man murdering his wife should, by no means, be misconstrued as psychotic or misogynistic. It is simply a device in which to explore what is wrong with the American upper class of the day. In this regard, it is original in its form, undoubtedly controversial. I also felt that its theme dealt with a Man's struggle to maintain his manhood, his masculinity amid enormous social pressure. Just as Yossarian's desertion in CATCH-22 gave its readers hope, I found Rojack's liberation from his burdens very uplifting. The book is all together an intense psychedelic trip, although his poetic language, at times, detracts from the flow of the gut-wrenching prose. It is one of a kind.Readers might like to know that this book is number two on my reading list!

Captures the essence of male anxiety and drives

Mailer's most riveting novel, closely followed by Tough Guys Don't Dance, American Dream hits the target again and again of the male drive to sex, power and adventure. Mailer's real ouvre is the post-war world of urban abandonment and existential adventure. This novel reeks of what the 20th C was all about, and has never been bettered by any author. Oddly, for such a masculine writer, Mailer's understanding is all about intuition and dark intimations. He is a magus not a rocket scientist. I read this book when I was going through my own puny version of the life of Stephen Rojack and could not believe how splendid it was.