Word: mailer
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...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...
...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...
Daring this literary brinksmanship, Mailer catches more than a glimpse of the abyss below. "How poor to go to death with no more than the notes of good intention," he wrote six years ago, in Advertisements. Every scene is almost over the edge, compressed with the tension of a man who may slip from his foothold on his own sweat; so is Mailer's prose--sometimes straight narrative riding on the sheer power of events, but sometimes inflated, rhetorical, once or twice embarrassing...
...What is 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