572 The American Century: Literature since 1945perspective. But it offers a radical and essentially unorthodox reading of the character
of Jesus. The Castle in the Forest (2007) also negotiates its way between the
documented and the imagined, as it reconstructs the childhood of Adolf Hitler as
perceived by Dieter, a demon assigned to send him on his path of destruction.
All three texts are skillful balancing acts. As such, they recall in particular how,
throughout his 1965 novel, An American Dream, Mailer has his hero Rojack negotiate
the edge between an America of hard fact and power politics and a nightworld
America of strange, subrational or supernatural experience. It is an edge that
An American Dream itself inhabits, as Mailer himself negotiates his way between a
harsh, empirical idiom here, and one that gestures toward strangeness – a dreamplace
or subterranean jungle where, as Rojack observes, “universes wheeled in a dream.”
“I was caught” between two Americas, Rojack admits, which clearly correspond to
the two rivers of American history described by his creator. All his career, Mailer was
similarly caught. Out of that capture, though, he produced fiction and nonfiction
that goes much further than most in uncovering the mysterious dialectic of power
that – for him, as for many others – constitutes the story of his nation.
There are many other novelists who have attempted a comparable negotiation in
the forms and themes of their writing. John O’Hara (1905–1970), from his acidic
first novel, Appointment in Samarra (1936) to the attenuated realism of Ten North
Frederick (1955) and From the Terrace (1958), has investigated the interconnections
of money, sex, and social position. John B. Marquand (1893–1960) explored class
and often the struggle between inherited conformity and personal desire in
novels like Point of No Return (1949). So does Louis Auchinclass (1917–2010) in such
books as Powers of Attorney (1963), The Dark Lady (1977), and The Book Class
(1984). There is a waspish, satirical quality to many of Auchinclass’s fictional
dissections of middle Americans. And that bent toward satire, a mordant moralism,
is even stronger in the fiction of John Cheever (1912–1982). The Wapshot Chronicle
(1957), for example, his most famous work, is an account at once wistful and comic
of a wealthy but declining Massachusetts family. The Stories of John Cheever (1978)
contains many pieces that ask the question why, as Cheever himself puts it, “in this
most prosperous, equitable, and accomplished world – where even the cleaning
women practice the Chopin preludes in their spare time – everyone should seem to
be disappointed.” In turn, his last book, Oh What a Paradise It Seems (1982),
continues the theme of the American dream, and the mystery of its unfulfillment.
But this time, by focusing on an aging man who is rejuvenated by an unusual
romance, Cheever informs his usual vein of comic melancholy with a feeling of
hope, some promise for the future. The wistful, melancholy note is stronger in the
work of Richard Yates (1926–1992). His first and finest novel, Revolutionary Road
(1961), tells the story of a young suburban couple, Frank and April Wheeler, who
believe the fulfillment of their dreams and desires is only just around the corner.
It never is; they never escape from the mediocre into something, some world,
commensurate with their capacity for wonder. And, skillfully negotiating his own
path between the romanticism of Fitzgerald and the mordancy of Cheever, Yates
casts a light on them that is at once cool and compassionate. The comic note isGGray_c05.indd 572ray_c 05 .indd 572 8 8/1/2011 7:31:32 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 32 PM