Word: rojack
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
More specifically, the story concerns Stephen Rojack, a war hero from Harvard (the "one intellectual in America's history with a Distinguished Service Cross"), ex-congressman, T.V. personality, professor of existentialist psychology with voodooish overtones, author, boxer, and stud non-pareil...
...Rojack murders his wife (an emasculating Great Bitch), tangles with cunning police, staggers into involuting imbroglios with an opportunistic fraulein, a southern chanteuse, a negro singing idol and, through them, with larger or vaguer or uglier forces--the Mafia, haut society, the Muslims, dirty politics, high finance, television, university intelligencia...
...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...
...again. How can we call him (either of them--we forget now who is the celebrity, who the shadow) a liberal intellectual, with all the puny impotence that implies? Rojack is a dilettante across the board of his life, all right, suspended lonely between anarchy and the Establishment, but he's roaring down the canyons of danger as well, whipping his own naked back with fevered thongs...