Country: USA
Genre: Literary/Noir
Pages: 270
I picked up this novel because of Jonathan Woods' top noir fiction list on Psycho-Noir. Norman Mailer was one of the names I was intrigued to see associated with the noir genre. I always associated the man with gritty and intense intellectual stuff, but I have to say, the thought of him doing noir was seducing. How can it go wrong? Well...it didn't. An American Dream doesn't exactly feel right either, but it's a quite unique piece of work that will force you out of your comfort zone. And it's exactly why we love Mailer, he's a bully.
An American Dream is the story of Stephen Rojack. A war hero, the author of a successful book: The Psychology Of The Hangman and a renowned television intellectual. He's a scarred man and he's quite unsatisfied with the way things have went for him. He's an overachiever, but he's second guessing his choices and his nature as a human being. There is this wonderfully tormented passage in the first chapter, where Rojack talks about murder and suicide, two very different muses he's sensible to and that will dictate the rest of the story. On a night where suicide calls him, Stephen will end up murdering his estranged wife Deborah, almost a mean of self-defense. The novel is Rojack's effort to create a vacuum of responsibilities around himself and recuperate the blissful innocence of his youth, in a city that doesn't want him roaming its streets.
This is typical Mailer stuff. He starts off with a bang and then he lets his characters drift away. By the end of the novel, I asked myself if he just sat at the typewriter and invented his novel on a daily basis. No planning, nothing. Not even in his mind. I'm not too sure what I should get out of it, except maybe that intellectuals rarely live to what they write. Rojack starts off in an enviable social position, but living up to the violence he talked about in his book lead him back a life in the streets and to loss that he didn't expect.
I liked it though. For a book about a man, trying to shed the weight of social responsibility from his shoulders, it's bleak and realistic. An American Dream is not your prototypical Mayberry Lounge novel. It's a story about a violent drifter that tries to find in the world, what education and war have stolen from him. This feeling of unity, of belonging to a certain universe. Most literary novels flirt with the theme of alienation eventually and Norman Mailer charges the subject like a bull in a china shop, which is the only way he ever learned to do this. An American Dream is a good Mailer novel, but expect the overwhelming feeling of satiety that comes when you finish one of his books. Reading Mailer is like stuffing yourself with sushi, you always end up confused and rolling on the floor afterward.
