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• W51402221 abstract "Mailer's fourth novel can be read as sardonic social criticism and dramatic critique on those nuances underlining the ambiguous values in contemporary America, on those individual roots of American aspirations and ideals. For Mailer, the collective ideal is civilized composite of everyone's primitive desires. ********** NEW DIRECTIONS, EVEN IN MAILER'S FICTION--An American Dream is departure from practically anything I have done before. (SI)--contain vestiges of the old, and Mailer's fourth novel can be read (as most critics and reviewers have done) as sardonic social criticism. National ideals seem under attack, as New York, Jack Kennedy, Las Vegas, Marilyn Monroe impart satiric tone to Rojack's dream. Just before his encounter with Barney Oswald Kelly, the current tycoon, Rojack enters the Waldorf and sees a nineteenth-century clock, eight feet high with bas relief of faces: Franklin, Jackson, Lincoln, Cleveland, Washington, Grant, Harrison, and Victoria; 1888 the year (207). At such times, the theme of national turned nightmare seems as obvious as the title suggests. It instead is an outgrowth of Mailer's great admiration of Dreiser's An American Tragedy, which represents (in Mailer's words) an end of period or a way of looking at things. If rewritten for the contemporary milieu, Dreiser's book would no longer be tragedy; it would be because in the last forty years, has been transition in consciousness in the character of our times which has moved us from the state of the tragedy to the state of the dream (SJ). Here Mailer is paraphrasing an earlier idea: there is subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the life of the nation (PP, 38). Mailer's An American Dream does not focus on the gross Dream of an America crisscrossed with telephone wires and television antennas, whose fad of the sixties is the conquest of the moon. Rather Mailer's novel, based on total cultural delicacies, is dramatic critique on those nuances underlining the ambiguous values in contemporary America, on those individual roots of American aspirations and ideals. And what results are peculiar inversions--for does not every American male, lulled by mass media sex and violence, secretly wish to commit incest or murder his wife? Such individual fantasies become nightmares when interpreted by the cultural norm. For Mailer, the collective ideal is civilized composite of everyone's primitive desires. The American Dream becomes another cultural mode of regimenting the individual, of rarefying and stultifying his true nature. To exist in one's own world is to avoid having one's ideals institutionalized. Mailer's fourth novel isolates one such dream. As his protagonist acts out his dream, the reader can see what stuff American dreams are made of--all the magic of murder and sex and one-way trip to the moon. Apart from its implied social criticism, Mailer's latest novel (his first in ten years) reveals new directions in his fiction. Replacing the use of the microcosm in his first three novels is the serial structure. Originally appearing in eight installments in Esquire, An American Dream is organized through series of small crises, but unlike those based on action with an emotional climax ending each episode. More experimental, Mailer's latest work is philosophical novel in serial form and what determines the shape of each episode is the existential possibilities underlining the plot. Supplementary to such plot are the many coincidences that significantly interlock the various characters, as if Rojack's were timed by the magic of events. Since action and character may seem too unbelievable, Mailer counters fantastic content with realistic presentation. The extraordinary must seem ordinary. Point-of-view is simplified. This is Mailer's first novel with unified sensibility, as Rojack relates all from his immediate present. …" @default.
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• W51402221 date "2007-09-22" @default.
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• W51402221 title "An American Dream: The Singular Nightmare" @default.
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