An American Dream (Norman Mailer)

The American Dream is an enormously prominent theme in the canon of Twentieth Century literature in the United States. The idea that anybody can make a success of themselves in the new world, in the "land of opportunity", is an idea which has consistently been interrogated by American novelists. By calling his novel 'An American Dream', Norman Mailer couldn't really have been more overt in announcing his intention to do just that. I feel that the grammatical significance of substituting the indefinite "an" for the definite "the" is incredibly important in reading this novel. It concerns the death of one American Dream, but there will be others, for it is in the DNA of the United States to dare to dream, no matter the consequences.

I have owned this book for eight years; it came in a box set of books from the 1960s, one per year of the decade, that I ordered from a book club at work. I had grand intentions at the time, I would read them all, in order, from 1960 to 1969. As memory serves, I gave up after 1962 and most of the books in the series remained unread, a wrong I am attempting to put right over the next few months (see also my review of 'The Drought' by J.G Ballard from April) Mailer's 'An American Dream' was published in 1965, having first been serialised in Esquire magazine in an attempt by Mailer to revive the Dickensian method of publishing fiction. It caused massive waves at the time with its graphic depiction of sex and violence and has been attacked by multiple feminist critics since, who accuse it of being overtly misogynist-not entirely inaccurately- but more on that later.

The narrator and protagonist, Stephen Rojack, is a decorated war hero, former congressman and sensationalist chat show host. He once dreamed of the kind of career trajectory enjoyed by Jack Kennedy, who he met in congress in 1946 and through whom he met his society beauty of a wife. It is this wife, Deborah Caughlin Mangaravidi Kelly, who has caused Rojack's life to fall somewhat short of the lofty heights it once promised to scale. In a neat homage to Fitzgerald, Deborah is described as "a girl who would be bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz", an emotionally abusive beauty who has managed to grind Rojack's ego into the ground with her metaphorical heel. As the novel begins, Rojack is on his way over to Deborah at her behest. Within a few pages, her taunting leads him to choke her to death. It's often the case that a murder or a death causes a weight to lift from off of a protagonist's shoulders- suddenly they are untouchable, alive, vital. Rojack's progress through the novel following the death of his wife forms the basis of the narrative, which is at times gripping and at others mundane. Ah, this book is a curious beast.

First, the good points. Rojack is an interesting creation, a hardboiled cynic good in a crisis, not unlike Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe. The first two chapters, during which the murder is disguised as a suicide, are entertaining and blackly humourous, and the heelish thought process which leads Rojack to go downstairs to have sex with the maid as his wife lies dead is written with real applomb. The sections where Rojack goes head to head with the New York City Police Department are tense and fast moving, and Mailer here creates in the reader a genuine concern for his protagonist. However, there are black marks in the ledger too. Mailer's style is rather heavy on the metaphors, and at times there's so much imagery it's all too easy to forget what's actually happening in the plot. The book often seems to fall flat just as it's working up to a high point, and I must say that at times it was tough to sustain interest in the story, though the premise and bare facts of the plot are good. It's a structural and stylistic issue that speaks of a great deal of authorial vanity, letting language get in the way of the storytelling rather than letting language assist the storyline. The love story which occurs following the narrator's release from police custody seems to become significant far too quickly to be plausible, and is riddled with cliché besides (a nightclub singer who needs "saving", oh please). I can also see why female critics had issues with the way women are presented in the novel: as sex objects or problems that need to be eliminated. The sex scenes are embarrassing too, like an amateur D.H Lawrence. Many years after the publication of this book, Mailer won a "bad sex in fiction" award for his last novel 'The Castle In The Forest' and it's not hard to see why.

I think what's frustrating about 'An American Dream' is that it could- and should- have been an excellent book. It has the premise, characters and plot to be an effective dissection of the American Dream and by extension the American obsession with money, power and status, but falls flat due to ineffective pacing and an overly fussy style. It's also difficult to fully engage emotionally to the events which should require that kind of response. Due to these flaws, I found 'An American Dream' disappointing and a missed opportunity.