Volume 4, Number 4 · March 25, 1965
Crime Without Punishment
By Philip Rahv
An American Dream
by Norman Mailer
Dial, 270 pp., $4.95
This is, to my mind, the most eccentric of the four novels Norman Mailer has written. It is far more eccentric, I think, than Barbary Shore—his second novel and a better one than literary opinion has generally taken it to be—which alienated readers not so much by personal singularity as by the extreme sectarianism of its political theme. In the case of that work it might well be said that the reader, wholly unprepared for that kind of statement, was in a certain sense quite as much at fault for its failure as the author. This latest book, however, has very few if any of the qualities that redeemed Barbary Shore as well as Mailer's other fictions.
Review, 2723 words
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