But this book is not strictly a character study. "It is more than a memoir and certainly has to be most curious as a biography, since it is as privileged as a novel," the narrator explains, thus offering some idea of where its problems lie. In any case Mailer's casual insights are far sharper than his important ones. The weight of preparation might have numbed him, but the inherent ironies of The Castle in the Forest (with a title that turns out to be slyly ambiguous) can still bring out his gleeful side.
Sometimes Mailer can hammer home the obvious ("Alois saw bees as living a life with parallels to his own") while still seeming to wink about his own heavy-handedness. At least it's best to hope that is what he's doing. To read a sentence like "she sensed that the greatest provocation to her husband would be to comment on his pipe" is to imagine a writer's cleverly pretending not to be clever — and doing it with quite a bit of success.
When the narrator promises to spare the reader a description of a dinner that he then goes on to describe, the same kind of gamesmanship seems to be at play. Unfortunately, when Mailer suggests that the reader can skip a long foray into the Russia of Czar Nicholas II, he turns out to be giving good advice.
Tricky or not, The Castle in the Forest has Mailer's unmistakable hallmarks. They are hallmarks that, as The Naked and the Dead (1948) approaches a major anniversary, have been unmistakable for 60 years. The new book is lascivious, grandiose, cosmically critical (finding something Teutonic in technology and touting it as the Devil's own handiwork) and cantankerous, filled with grandstanding pronouncements on the nature of evil. About religious extremism, he writes: "We love fundamentalists. Their faith offers us every promise of developing into the final weapon of mass destruction."
The mass murderer Adolf Hitler is a child called "Adi" in this book. His menace comes alive only by implication. But his father, Alois Hitler, is true to his own father's "tradition of apocalyptic intercourse in barn straw." His nature is as dangerous as his son's, but with one great difference: Alois is intoxicated by women. About Alois' connoisseurship of female anatomy, Mailer writes: "This was as close as Alois ever came to admiring the Creator."
Beleaguered, despotic, aggrieved, boastfully sensual and always ready to pontificate, Alois is yet another version of the devil Mailer knows.
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