Apparently, hiding beneath all of the vanity, fashion, good put-ons, there is something lingering within us that is urging us to strike, kill, and we resist, well, all of us but the insane, innit right?
I have been so ridden with anxiety lately, this has been a hard one to take, so I took and took and took anyway, escaped in some other guy's problems. That guy being Stephen Rojack, ex military, ex congressman, high society intellectual with a television show, a solid university job, and as he built this grandest of block houses, the child made it go KABLOOM, like we'd all like to do. He sends his wife plummeting to her death, fucks her maid after he does it, rationalizes his way out of suspicion, and lingers in this inextricably alive feeling when caught between his conscience and his raw passion to destroy and rebuild, returning something to himself that he felt wilt away in his life of accomplishment. He finds a new love, beats the shit out of her ex (a famous singer), runs around town drinking and trying to figure things out, and what he comes to in an abstract way is the plain cruelty of the high-brow, and the plain cruelty of having cruelty masked in the lavishness.
I'm not so used to stories being told this way, as I am much more interested in bums, low-class intellectuals who have their books and their willingness to suspend morals in search of the IT (like Kerouac would say). But a-ha! Where Mailer's upper-class drama of the callings of the moon and other psychologically acute madness depart greatly from what I'm used to, it is this suspension of morals, the willingness to delve into the uncomfortable passions of the human spirit, the Evil (as he explores such a dichotomy of God v. Devil, through Rojack the philosopher, the existentialist, figuring them to be much more evenly matched than the puritan types might have you assume), which show a close relationship to the beats, the progressives, the generation of rebellion against the obviousness of how things are and will always be. The heat, as he breaks his wife's collar bone and throws her to the street then immediately goes to screw Ruta in the vagina, in the ass, this raw carnal action both disturbing, engrossing, and erotic, this is a heat that dwells in us and leaves our registers as exhaust while we focus on how to live well-adjusted, and Rojack throws it to the wind so he can enter the realm of chaos, exhilaration, fear, and the living.
The way in which Mailer presents this is fairly formalistic, and his words dance fashionably across the page, sometimes distracting through all the philosophy, though sometimes he takes a deep breath and goes and goes which is wild and appropriate for the racing mind of this tory. I take issue with the form, at times, to an extent, but I remember then that Norman Mailer was no low-class beatnik roaming the world, and his approach is a product of who it seems he is. Also, the thrills of the escape from the police, the escape from Shago and his blade, these were cheap thrills woven into the plot that draw parallels to Shakespeare's perverse jokes for the lower-income crowd, and can be dismissed as such, but also appreciated as such. Still, through its presentation, there is a Nihilist behind this novel, a man who thrives in the absurdity and the cruelty of the world, and isn't afraid to expose it in a most severe and witty manner.
I can certainly relate to Rojack. I have definitely felt the sting of feeling your whole life was this set-up pit of mediocrity, some gains and some failures, but all failures in that life hasn't been experienced as sharp as one would like it, and while I have never felt the most savage of acts was necessary to turn me back to life, it is this extreme case represented in "An American Dream" that causes one to look around and see the dastardly life surrounding...and perhaps do something.
"In some, madness must come in with breath, mill through the blood, and be breathed out again. In some it goes up to the mind. Some take the madness and stop it with discipline. Madness is locked beneath. It goes into tissues, is swallowed by the cells. The cells go mad. Cancer is their flag. Cancer is the growth of madness denied."
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