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It is hard to decide what the novel is, let alone how good it is. One guess, which is tough to talk away, is that Dream is a dream, a deliberate parading of the author's nightmares and virility fantasies. Mailer stabbed his wife; Stephen Rojack, the chap who double-dated with J.F.K. in the novel, throws his wife out of a window. Mailer dislikes cops; Rojack engages in a long duel with the fuzz, who are trying to pin the murder on him (they fail). Rojack is a haunted and hunted loner, squatting without shelter between hip and square; Mailer may see himself this way.
Cutting Off. Certainly the novel is a crime story—and when Mailer pays attention to his narrative, it is a good one, with a snapping what-happens-next quality. But what seems likeliest is that Mailer is preaching again. In The Naked and the Dead he preached about fascism; Dream's preachment is that salvation comes only by cutting oneself off from society. Eventually, it is you against the rest of them.
Under this rubric, Rojack's killing of his wife becomes a station on the way to self-realization. By the time of the fatal act, Rojack has quit Congress to become a TV lecturer and a university professor "with the not inconsiderable thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death were the roots of motivation." Magic is represented by love-making with his mistress Cherry. Dread presumably is provided by his wife, a voluptuous bitch who may represent the square society. When he kills her, he is deserted by his university and his TV sponsors. Walled off from the masses on one hand and the intelligentsia on the other, he takes his tempered soul off to the jungles of Guatemala.
Summarized, this sounds like a ride on a hobbyhorse. But because Mailer is a born writer, it is a heady ride—a bit absurd but, like all of the latter-day Mailer, somehow disarming because it has been attempted by a man who knows all along that the bystanders may laugh.