An American Dream | Norman Mailer | I 've listened about 12 times in the car

An American Dream | Norman Mailer | American nightmare

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An American Dream

	An American Dream Norman Mailer Vintage, 1999 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 30 reviews view larger image
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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 Deborah Caughlin Kelly. But one night, in the prime of his existence, he hears the moon talking to him on the terrace of a fashionable New York high-rise, and it is urging him to kill himself. It is almost as a defense against that infinitely seductive voice that Rojack murders his wife.

In this wild battering ram of a novel, which was originally published to vast controversy in 1965, Norman Mailer creates a character who might be a fictional precursor of the philosopher-killer he would later profile in The Executioner's Song. As Rojack runs amok through the city in which he was once a privileged citizen, Mailer peels away the layers of our social norms to reveal a world of pure appetite and relentless cruelty. Sensual, horrifying, and informed by a vision that is one part Nietzsche, one part de Sade, and one part Charlie Parker, An American Dream grabs the reader by the throat and refuses to let go.

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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.

American nightmare

Former Congressman and current alcoholic Stephen Rojack murders his estranged wife, a maven of high society, in a sudden, delirious rage, then throws her body from the window to make it look like suicide. Over the course of the following 36 hours or so, he must deal with the police and his powerful father-in-law and begins a tentative romance with a nightclub singer. Suffering from too much alcohol and too little sleep, his sanity becomes more frayed and his encounters become increasingly surreal.

Writing in the first person perspective of a character whose mind is falling apart, Norman Mailer produced prose that is frequently opaque but never dull, often coming up with startling turns of phrase. The landscape of Mailer's American dream is fraught with violence, superstition, and unseemly sex. I'm not sure I know what to make of it all, but it certainly is a stimulating ride.

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The devil's in the details of the American Dream.

"Ultimately a hero is a man who would argue with the gods, and so awakens devils to contest his vision. The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation." Norman Mailer

As Pulitzer Prize winner Mailer's (1923) fourth novel reveals, the devil dwells in the details of the American dream. An American Dream (1965) tells the powerful story of war-hero, congressman, television talk-show host, intellectual, Stephen Rojack, who seems to be the embodiment of the American Dream, that is, until his inner demons summon him to kill his estranged wife Deborah in an alcohol-fueled rage. After throwing her body from a Manhattan window, he then defends himself by claiming she committed suicide. Written after he stabbed his second wife (Adele Morales) with a penknife at a party in 1960, Mailer's novel may be read as an apologia on violence as a form of personal redemption in a culture of convention and conformity. Upon its publication, it also sparked a controversy over Mailer's portrayal of women (see Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, 1970). His controversial study of Stephen Rojack is characteristic Mailer: brilliant, poetic, and compelling.

G. Merritt

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The death of the American Dream

Mailer's `classic' story of a supposedly all-American life gone astray is at times very good, but all too often it doesn't reach the heights that it is aiming for. The concept of the American Dream is something that has loomed large in popular culture both in the US and in the exported version of that culture abroad. Many authors and artists have attempted to explore and seek out the essence of this rather ambiguous concept (Hunter S. Thompson comes to mind). More often than not they have not really known where to look and have come to the conclusion that the American Dream is dead or at least decaying. This view is central to Mailer's own investigation into the Dream. In this book he attempts to convey a broader picture of society through the fall from grace and respectability of a middle-aged successful former Congressman.

Certainly the downfall of one man's life from seeming respectability and contentment into upheaval, the underworld and the margins of his former society can be seen as a metaphor for an American generation in general or even the entire society. The fixation on suicide throughout the book seems almost a forced symbolic element when taken as part of the surface or primary story; it definitely makes more sense when applied to the death of the American dream as a whole. That Mailer sees US society standing on the ledge of building and alternating between the impulse to jump and self-preservation I think is a rather accurate assessment of the times he was writing about. The problem is that the effort to tie this into the story of the individual is too obvious or unnatural for lack of a better term.

Mailer set his goal high in writing this book, but for this kind of work the parallel meanings have to both be obvious, be able to stand independent of each other, and most importantly, naturally intertwine with each other. The failure to do so results in something that might have been great and yet clearly is not. All that being said, I did enjoy the book for the most part and would recommend it as a decent story and summation of a challenging time in the history of US society. One certainly cannot fault Mailer for the attempt.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

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