Word: rojack
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Psychic Energy. There are also the author's ritual mentions of the liver as if it were a window on the soul, psychosomatic illness, and plenty of vigorous metaphors on the uses of terror, dread and psychic energy. He even parodies Rojack of An American Dream by playing around on the terrace ledge of his hotel room, high above the streets of Kinshasa. As always, Mailer is keenly aware of his own celebrity when mixing with other celebrities. As always, no one can cut the competition as well as he does. Zaire's President Mobutu reminds Mailer...
...opens his attack by uncovering Millett's sexual gaff in her treatment of the motivation for the central murder in Mailer's own, An American Dream. Millett maintains that the novel's hero Rojack kills his wife to punish her for committing sodomous adultery. But Mailer insists (and who after all, should know better than he?) that the crime was not in fact, sodomy, but analingus. Academic perhaps, but indicative to Mailer of a mind that hedges the niceties of distinction, a mind that abandons evidence in the pursuit of thesis...
...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...
...Mailer's "American Dream?" It must be a whole horizon of dreams gone sour, not into nightmares but into that phantasmagoric horror of hallucinogens, where one feels the vomit recede back down the throat through massive pressure from neck muscles. The Valentino Dream of sexual power gone wild as Rojack somersaults with the maid while his wife's corpse empties its intestines on the upstairs rug; the Dream of the Heiress polluted by Deborah's guileful malevolence; The Alger Dream of self-made empires gone rotten in her father's diabolic machinations; The Westerner Dream of the loner...
...leverage, however, I was one of the more active figures of the city--no one could be certain finally that nothing large would ever come from me." Rojack writes of Mailer, of course. An American Dream is large; we know Mailer had in mind something a great deal larger. The critics are I think too certain that it will not come