Word: maddens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that. But I had usually been able to picture myself as not wholly un-macho. I could stand up for my friends...I tried to hold my own. Yet now, each time my mind was clear enough to bring forth a new idea, panic soiled me. Not surprisingly. Madden gets from his childhood not a unified approach to life but rather a set of sharp reactions by which he decides whom to worship and whom to despise...
...PERHAPS the greatest of the novel's many ironies that every character, not just Tim, experiences the world as a hateful siege of contrary elements. And though Tim can see this in the other characters, the perception does not help him. Mailer conveys this best when Madden describes a sleazy friend and would-be rival of his in Provincetown...
...Madden and Nissen apprehend the world not simply or sympathetically but indirectly through a theory of hierarchical oppositions. Other, like-minded characters in the novel agree that it's okay to be poor or to be a pervert so as long as one is genuinely a reverse snob and can believe that being at the bottom of "the ladder" is just as good as being at the top. Of course, Mailer's characters cannot accept any such proposition for long: the inevitable resurgence of desire--for status, normalcy, wealth, or what-not-cancels the values of the day before...
...Madden finds a plastic bag containing, to his horror, a blond and severed head. Madden lacks the nerve, at this point, to identify the remains...
...night, well into his routine, he spots an attractive blond who reminds him of his wife; Madden joins her and her escort, learns that he is a lawyer and that both of them are visiting from California. Madden makes a conversational play for the woman before his memory blacks out. The next morning he wakes up with a hangover and a new tattoo on his right arm; he discovers that the passenger seat in his Porsche is covered with blood. Then the acting police chief calls him in and suggests that Madden move his hidden cache of marijuana before state...