The Public Act

AN AMERICAN DREAM by Norman Mailer. 270 pages. Dial. $4.95.

If Norman Mailer is not the best U.S. novelist of his time, he is certainly the most conspicuous. No literary cocktail party or TV panel is complete without him, whether he appears in his role of spokesman for the intellectual left or as prophet of the new morality.

In fact, what appears to have occupied most of his energy during the last decade is not novel writing but a messianic effort at transmogrifying the entire U.S.--society, psyches, applecarts and all. That this is the business of a holy man, or an adman, does not deter him. Mailer yearns to be hip, but he is inescapably square. For only a born square would preach the way he does. That is what is exasperating, touching, and ultimately tedious about him.

He discovers that sex is important and complicated, and goes on and on about the need for correct orgasms. He suggests that adolescent hoods be enlisted in an "Adventure Corps," in which they could test their manhood against authentic danger. Or he writes an article (nonpolemic, visionary, slightly stodgy) on the future architecture of cities. In 1960 he planned seriously (he is always serious) to run for mayor of New York. He never did; that was the year he stabbed his second wife, Adele.

The Good Fight. In The Presidential Papers, he wrote of his "small inability to handicap odds." It is no small inability; it is the lack of a sense of proportion. All of his ideas seem equally good to him, all fights equally worth fighting. He is in danger, also, of becoming less a private sensibility than a public act. His very long essay on the first Liston-Patterson fight contains a detailed description of how he had gone to pieces that weekend; hung over and distracted at a press conference after the fight, he shouted insults at Liston, got himself carried bodily from the room.

With his usual compulsive need for self-abasement, Mailer explains what had happened. Partly, he reports, his near crack-up occurred because he had drunk too much. But the largest and (if this were not Mailer talking) least believable reason was that he had opposed Conservative William Buckley in a formal public debate on the night before the fight. Mailer had prepared seriously for the debate, he says, and it was clear that he had won. Friends said so. Then came the next day's New York Times, which reported the debate frivolously and passed the result off as a draw. This injustice, he says, set him off.

Double Date. His latest public act is his latest novel. In 1963, Esquire announced that Mailer had undertaken to write a New Novel against monthly deadlines, the way Dickens used to write. The first installment, published two months after the assassination of President Kennedy, began in brisk damn-said-the-duchess style: "I met Jack Kennedy in November 1946. We were both war heroes, and both of us had just been elected to Congress. We went out one night on a double date . . . and I seduced a girl who would have been bored by a diamond as big as the Ritz." Now, five months after the last installment appeared. Dial Press has published this tidied-up though not cleaned-up hard-cover version.

It is hard to decide what the novel is, let alone how good it is. One guess, which is tough to talk away, is that Dream is a dream, a deliberate parading of the author's nightmares and virility fantasies. Mailer stabbed his wife; Stephen Rojack, the chap who double-dated with J.F.K. in the novel, throws his wife out of a window. Mailer dislikes cops; Rojack engages in a long duel with the fuzz, who are trying to pin the murder on him (they fail). Rojack is a haunted and hunted loner, squatting without shelter between hip and square; Mailer may see himself this way.

Cutting Off. Certainly the novel is a crime story--and when Mailer pays attention to his narrative, it is a good one, with a snapping what-happens-next quality. But what seems likeliest is that Mailer is preaching again. In The Naked and the Dead he preached about fascism; Dream's preachment is that salvation comes only by cutting oneself off from society. Eventually, it is you against the rest of them.

Under this rubric, Rojack's killing of his wife becomes a station on the way to self-realization. By the time of the fatal act, Rojack has quit Congress to become a TV lecturer and a university professor "with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation." Magic is represented by love-making with his mistress Cherry. Dread presumably is provided by his wife, a voluptuous bitch who may represent the square society. When he kills her, he is deserted by his university and his TV sponsors. Walled off from the masses on one hand and the intelligentsia on the other, he takes his tempered soul off to the jungles of Guatemala.

Summarized, this sounds like a ride on a hobbyhorse. But because Mailer is a born writer, it is a heady ride--a bit absurd but, like all of the latter-day Mailer, somehow disarming because it has been attempted by a man who knows all along that the bystanders may laugh.

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