If this is the dream, PLEASE don't let me see the nightmare!

This is superbly written, with one of the best representations of sex that I have ever read. There is nothing that could offend the most prudish of readers and yet...

The story is one of spiralling destruction. There is never a moment when one expects a happy ending but still, it is not a morbid book.

Well worth a read but, I don't think it goes on my re-read list. ( )

This is a Mailer that I read, but did not keep. The story is an extended fantasy on the lines of, "if I really let it all hang out, this is the kind of violence that I would wreak on my world." Kill the wife, and then lunge across the American Media for a summer, and then, why I'd just have the job of being famous for being famous. I don't like the hero, I don't think many of the people he disrespects deserve it, and, while I do dislike the wife, I'm thinkin' all he needed was a divorce and a bender.
Norman Mailer after "The Naked and the Dead" had to keep on being an important writer, and this was his attempt to keep going. But what this book does do, and perhaps that is what it meant to do, was forecast the entire spectacle of the decline and fall of O.J. Simpson? ( )

After doing a little research on Norman Mailer, I decided to read something of his. I happened to get this book for free from a friend, so it made sense to start with this one.

Three things come to my mind after reading this book: violence, metaphorical language, and great writing. This book is entirely about violence, but Mailer uses beautiful language techniques (similes and metaphors) that help romanticize violence in a way that I've never experienced before. Also, Norman Mailer knew how to write! His prose is very deep, philosophical, and beautiful...even though he was a horror of a human being while living.

I must say, this book did not let me down. I know I will read others by Mailer now...but I have to take a break after reading this bleak view of humanity. ( )

Putting American in the title of a book doesn't make it great. This book seemed much longer than its length; I found the writing turgid. The contents of Stephen Rojack's psyche is everything in this novel: what he smells; the plight of the intellectual beating, fucking and drinking all comers under the table. Rojack has a world view I could not identify with, but I did not find him an interesting enough creation to want to look at the world through him eyes, or smell it with his twitching canine nose.

The plot seemed flimsy and contrived, characters would expose to Rojack a story about their past and it often led to a bunch of dead ends - or a pat coincidence - are there only 10 people in all of the United States? At some points I thought, maybe this is a satire, is there something darkly comic at the heart of this? Maybe, it didn't make me laugh. If you want to read a book about transgression and haven't yet read American psycho - read that instead of this - it's much funnier. ( )

http://www.schlaikjer.net/reviews/171.htm ( )