A review by muninnherself
An American Dream by Norman Mailer

3.0

Well, it's a book of its time, isn't it, and reading it now (or in the early/mid-noughties when I read it) you're likely to spend a lot of time going 'ah, this is why some people love Mailer, and some people hate him'. It is a bit like a parody of white American male sixties bravura, covering up fear of impotence and such like. I mean it's pretty horrific with its throwaway misogyny and racism. But that's what things were like. Doesn't mean it's OK. I think the late fifties/early sixties is where you really find this feeling, a particular sense of place and time, like the early Bond films, or, from a British, female perspective, Margaret Drabble or Edna O'Brien. To remind you that although everyone looks flipping amazing in the photos, with their frocks and their mohair suits and their narrow shoes tap tap tapping on the sidewalk, it wasn't a great time, really, and you wouldn't want to live there.