Word: mailer
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...shouting, roaring "Look at me! Look at ME!" O.K., I say, I'll stand there and shiver with him rather than step out into the crowd and point, and laugh, or look a bit bemused and tut-tut to my neighbor. Because some big gas is building up in Mailer's chest, straining against his rib cage, straining to explode out any orifice into a dazzling fireworks of vision, or prophecy, or whatever those fireworks are that naked writers with gaseous insides hope to release in testament to their genius...
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...