An American Dream
Book description
In this wild battering ram of a novel, which was originally published to vast controversy in 1965, Norman Mailer creates a character who might be a fictional precursor of the philosopher-killer he would later profile in The Executioner’s Song. As Stephen Rojack, a decorated war hero and former congressman who…
Why read it?
2 authors picked An American Dream as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
An American Dream beats with the pulse of some huge night carnivore. It’s a wild story set in Manhattan with its protagonist, Stephen Rojack, drunk, dismally in debt, and trapped in a kind of purgatory he calls “marriage”. What I particularly like about this novel is Mailer’s writing style. It is magical in that he somehow combines the gritty talk of a hipster with the edgy rhetoric of psychiatry. What comes out of that confluence is a prose as sharp and effective as a switchblade. This novel, I believe, redefines the American crime novel by presenting the most extreme…
From Ron's list on the best crime fiction writers in the world.
Three harrowing days in the broken-down life of Stephen Rojack, self-appointed existential psychologist, TV personality of dubious distinction, novice mystic, and all-around deeply-frightened soul who one night strangles his wife in a fit of rage over a particular sexual practice of his, goes downstairs, buggers the German maid, visions of the four Nazi soldiers he killed during the war dancing through his head, tosses the wife’s corpse over the balcony which causes a traffic jam down below whose complications will reverberate throughout the rest of the novel and all that’s just in the first two chapters.
The whole feverish melodrama…
From Stephen's list on guaranteed to drive you out of your skull.
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