Word: mailer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Then I say, Uh-uh. I am tired by this time, and not altogether sure, with such impressive weight on the other side. But I say at last that it is almost a great book. It is wildly flawed, too big for Mailer, unbelievable, confused, without humor (though with much wit), not a thriller (though it might have ben a smashing thriller), not a psychology, lacking in characterization. But finally, An American Dream has immense proportions--almost, one might say, mythic proportions--and the relentless pace of carnivore running hunted through a modern jungle to feast and keep from being...
...publishers advise us that Mailer has dramatized the unthinkable. Rather, he has dramatized the supremely thinkable, demonic fantasies of fear and courage, of ambition, of aggression and virility that serve as fodder for the dreams of futile men. He tells of suppressed obsessions, impulses not acted out quite, but lived on the edge of, destruction of the malignant in oneself, in what one loves, suicide and murder. Mostly, perhaps he tells of intercourse, intercourse with oceanic climax, coming in waves not of love, but of something between lust and pure aestheticism. All of the sex is magnificent, art, but written...
...Rojack (like Mailer?) knows so many worlds that he is never an insider. Rojack is in limbo, always a familiar face, always tuned in on the less guarded secrets, but always a floater on the periphery, always a nose pressed against the glass. This is Rojack (and Mailer his shadow), much too hip to swing with the squares, but too close to power to call himself an outcast; doomed to a netherworld of liberal intellectuals, never in the back rooms with Mr. Big nor safe on a midnight street in Harlem...
...Rojack (like Mailer?) con- ducts his life as if it were some black experiment, he needs the battle even when life itself has almost been kicked out of him, needs the action, the booze, the orgasm--that inescapable moment--even with the fetid breath of murder and suicide and madness congealing in his nostrils. Even dizzy on the parapet, exhausted in the desert, he pushes on, tracking the devil, hunting out a more ultimate disaster; ready, even on the precipice of collapse, to go the very depths of possible experience...
Daring this literary brinksmanship, Mailer catches more than a glimpse of the abyss below. "How poor to go to death with no more than the notes of good intention," he wrote six years ago, in Advertisements. Every scene is almost over the edge, compressed with the tension of a man who may slip from his foothold on his own sweat; so is Mailer's prose--sometimes straight narrative riding on the sheer power of events, but sometimes inflated, rhetorical, once or twice embarrassing...