Word: normans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...with some of the more current writers. Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis is out in two new editions, which for the first time render all those horrendous Latin passages in English-and, surrounded by the author's quaint 19th century moralizing, they seem tame alongside Candy or Norman Mailer's An American Dream...
...from the pathetic phallacy according to which all existence revolves around sex. Many authors today treat sex the way Marxists treat economics; they see it at the root of everything, and daydream about sexual triumph the way revolutionary writers daydream about power. Thus in the tirelessly explicit writing of Norman Mailer, sex is a personal boast, a mystique and an ideology-and, in all three capacities, solemn and unconvincing...
Then I say, maybe it is only hatred in Norman's chest. Maybe it is only a stockpile of frustration--the frustration of an ego that grows hungrier with every feeding, of a heterosexual in an era of pan-sexuality; frustration with language too meager to ciutch at ideas his mind is shaping, with mind too meager to clutch at ideas he'd like to shape, with creative ambitions that far exceed what greatness he can hope to claim, with material that will not yield its secrets, like rocky soil intractable to a battered plough...
Come, I say next, how can you take Norman seriously? This man who declared himself a candidate for Mayor of New York, then stabbed his wife in the stomach? Who claimed credit for Kennedy's election? Who hollered drunk insults at Sonny Liston and was carried from the press conference? How can you take this man seriously? It's so unfashionable...
...book is a pot boiler--implausible, silly, absurd. The critics, more patronizing than venomous, they were right. It is a joke. A good joke, and even Norman knew we would laugh, with its superhero hero, outrageous farce situations. Or a grotesque joke, so ugly with violence and incest and morbid broodings and salacious psychopathology; a joke in bad taste...