By Lewis Nichols. New York Times, 4 April 1965.
Most of the reviews of Norman Mailer’s “An American Dream” now are in, and to the surprise of no one, they run, as the saying goes, the gamut. What happened on this newspaper is pretty typical—Conrad Knickerbocker in the Book Review liked the book very much; Eliot Fremont-Smith, the daily reviewer, liked it not at all. Of some 30 reviews examined, nine were clearly on the side of the book, 13 were clearly against, the others were part good, part bad—the “awful but entertaining” type of thing by which a reviewer puts down on both sides. Here are a few of the quotations—“may well represent the first significant step the current American novel has taken into fresh territories of the imagination” (John W. Aldridge in Life)… . “A dreadful novel” (Stanley Edgar Hyman in The New Leader)… . “episodes come together in a pattern of remarkable imaginative coherence and intensity” (Paul Pickerel in Harper’s)… . “I should like to believe the novel is a hoax, and perhaps to some extent it is” (Granville Hicks in Saturday Review)… . “Here we have the same old violent Mailer, except not so good as before. * * * From this point Mailer has only one way to go, and that is up.” (Tom Yarbrough in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch). All this helps sell books, and while not yet on the best seller list, this one appears headed that way.