New Mailer

[Paul Di Filippo]

The publishing industry seems determined to innundate us this season 
with big books from famous names.

 From PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY:



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The Castle in the Forest
Norman Mailer. Random, $26.95 (496p) ISBN 978-0-394-53649-1

Mailer did Jesus in The Gospel According to the Son; now he plumbs the 
psyche of history’s most demonic figure in this chilling fictional 
chronicle of Hitler’s boyhood. Mailer tells the story through the eyes 
of Dieter, a devil tasked by Satan (usually called the Maestro) with 
fostering Hitler’s nascent evil, but in this study of a dysfunctional 
19th-century middle-class Austrian household, the real presiding spirit 
is Freud. Young Adolph (often called Adi) is the offspring of an 
incestuous marriage between a coarse, domineering civil servant and a 
lasciviously indulgent mom. The boy duly develops an obsession with 
feces, a fascination with power, a grandiose self-image and a sexually 
charged yen for mass slaughter (the sight of gassed or burning beehives 
thrills him). Dieter frets over Hitler’s ego-formation while marveling 
at the future dictator’s burning gaze, his ability to sway weak minds 
and the instinctive führerprinzip that emerges when he plays war with 
neighborhood boys, talents furthered by Central Europe’s ambient 
romantic nationalism. Mailer’s view of evil embraces religions and 
metaphysics, but it’s rooted in the squalid soil of toilet-training 
travails and perverted sexual urges. The novel sometimes feels like a 
psychoanalytic version of The Screwtape Letters, but Mailer arrives at 
a somber, compelling portrait of a monstrous soul. (Jan. 23)
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