Review: "An American Dream" by Norman Mailer

Norman Mailer is one of the towering figures of 20^th century American literature and one of the most divisive, and it is because books like An American Dream. This book is less a novel and more like an assault on sacred values as well as the reader’s sensibilities. It is at times an angry book, a philosophical book and a downright angry book, but it always seems to be a plodding, meandering mess with a rather terrible protagonist both morally and on the page. I looked up some info on this book, and when it came out in the 1960’s, it really pissed women off, and seeing as how the two women central to the book’s narrative are portrayed, it is easy to see why. I will always give credit to Mailer for giving the world something like The Executioner’s Song, easily one of the most important and best book’s ever written, but book’s like this, The Fight and Harlot’s Ghost, I am not very impressed. It begins with Stephen Rojack, a moderately successful former politician turned TV personality killing his wife and making it look like a suicide. What happens after that is a rather dull trip down into the underworld, where Stephen sexually objectifies a woman named Cherry who might have connections to the mob and alienates the high society he was seemingly born into. Stephen is not a nice guy and dare I say, not a very interesting one, at least in the year 2017. He drinks too much and has extramarital affairs, but what protagonist doesn’t during the literary timeframe this came out? I dig a few scenes, like Stephen’s interrogation from cops just as sleazy as he is and a sex scene involving foot worship, but as a whole, I found this book an unpleasant drag, and from now on, I won’t be so quick to pick up a Mailer book as I was in the past.

Rating: 3/5

Review: "Harlot's Ghost" by Norman Mailer

Reading any book over 1000 pages is exhausting, especially one with as much dead space and boring exposition as Harlot’s Ghost, Norman Mailer’s epic novel about the CIA and at 1168 pages in paperback form, and his longest. I never know what I am going to get when I open up a Mailer book. He is a giant of 20^th century literature, a creative genius at home wearing many hats. He can write something as introspective yet overly macho like The Fight, his account of the fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali in Zaire yet create what I feel is one of the great and most important works of the century with The Executioner’s Song, his mammoth “non-fiction novel” on the life and trial of murderer Gary Gilmore. So this book, which has some bright moments, both poignant and hilarious (whether intentional or not) and some lousy ones, is still and experience I cherished throughout reading it. The book opens in a rather interesting fashion, with CIA spy Harry Hubbard, recounting the death of his mentor, the Harlot of the title, all the while carrying on with a mistress, lamenting the lost love of Kittredge, his wife and third cousin, and finally, recounting the ghosts he has seen in his Maine harbor manor, this last part being the book’s most inspired aspect. After getting shipped off to Moscow for security reasons, he takes along his 1000 page memoir, and the rest of the novel finds him reading it, along with various letters, mostly between him and Kittredge, reliving his life and the influence he had on such events as the Bay of Pigs and the assassination of JFK. This is a hard book to summarize, since it has lots of characters, and the motivation of most of them and the details of their plans, much like in the CIA, are vague and kept in the shadows. What really shines though is the persona; connections people make in such a world, whether that be purely sexual (this book is ripe with bad sex scenes) paternal, or substantial love, like the extended section where Harry falls in love with someone who I think is a stand-in for Marilyn Monroe.by far not his best, with the failed promise of a sequel more of a threat than a treat, I found this curiosity mostly pleasurable even if it wasn’t all that good. 

Rating: 3/5