Mailer's Choice (Critical Essay‪)‬

The Castle in the Forest By Norman Mailer New York: Random House, 2007 477 pp. Cloth $27.95 IN AN INTERVIEW I DID WITH NORMAN MAILER for New York Magazine about his novel, The Gospel According to the Son, he had reminded me: "You remember those attitudes prevalent about 30 years ago, that God is dead? Well, the Holocaust is a direct precursor of those attitudes." I remembered our talk as I was reading The Castle in the Forest. Many of Mailer's most fervent admirers seem to be at a loss when dealing with God and the Devil, as they must, when giving a serious reading to this novel. It seems that it is okay to write about religion, say, in the high-minded way that Harold Bloom does, which is more about the history of religion rather than dealing with God and the Devil as active players and in the gauzy Hollywood movies that mix the theological with the ultimate in sound effects, but apparently it is less okay when our favorite heroic novelist puts God and the Devil on center stage. Dieter, the SS man in whose body Satan has housed his emissary, and Dummkopf, the weakened God, tend to get skipped over by uneasy politically correct critics, the way one averts one's gaze from a blemish on the face of a loved one.