Maestro of the Human Ego

By LEE SIEGEL
The New York Times
January 21, 2007

Review: THE CASTLE IN THE FOREST
By Norman Mailer.
477 pp. Random House. $27.95.

There is a semi-harrowing, careening, self-burlesquing moment that occurs deep in Norman Mailer’s “Armies of the Night,” his third-person account of taking part in the massive protest against the Vietnam War in Washington in October 1967 — not only an American masterpiece, but one of the most liberating books ever swirled into being by a human mind. Mailer has succeeded in getting himself arrested, and he’s thrown into a police wagon with a young American Nazi.

They stare each other down, exchange threats, stand steaming and streaming together in that quickest form of intimacy known as hatred. The Nazi begins the taunting:

“ ‘You Jew bastard,’ he shouted. ‘Dirty Jew with kinky hair.’

“They didn’t speak that way. It was too corny. Yet he could only answer, ‘You filthy Kraut.’

“ ‘Dirty Jew.’

“ ‘Kraut pig.’ ”

Their insults run parallel, their stares converge:

“ ‘Come here, you coward,’ he said to Mailer, ‘I’ll kill you.’

“ ‘Throw the first punch, baby,’ said Mailer, ‘you’ll get it all.’ ” Mailer writes: “They were both absolutely right. They had a perfect sense of the other.” Each was ready to brawl. And what if they should? “In retrospect, it would appear not uncomic — two philosophical monomaniacs with the same flaw — they could not help it, they were counterpunchers.” Then it is back to their inexorable, almost hilarious enmity.

Mailer’s power and allure rest in his being, at once, self-surrendering and astringently assertive. Both qualities are present in the encounter with the Nazi. People who have the gift of melting into another nature usually need to assert themselves all the more so as not to melt away altogether. Actors, for example, often self-destruct because they turn their assertiveness inward, against themselves; Mailer, a sometime film performer and director, is fascinated by the actor’s craft. His bellicose bravado seems to be a stay against the dissolving of his personality and — not always successfully — against self-induced harm.

“They had a perfect sense of the other.” Early on, Mailer understood that in a democracy in which the most radically different types of people are thrown together, a harmonious encounter with “the other” is an American dream (e.g., the national obsession with the Relationship), the reality of which often becomes an American nightmare (e.g., popular culture’s obsession with crime). For the Brooklyn-raised, Jewish, middle-class Mailer, who once wrote about himself that there was “one personality he found absolutely insupportable — the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn” — a perfect sense of the more extreme forms of otherness became artistic and intellectual mother’s milk.

No surprise, then, that Mailer’s previous novel, “The Gospel According to the Son,” in which he attempted to inhabit Jesus Christ, felt less like a creative vision than a head-butt against eternity. The material had a built-in obstruction to Mailer’s gift of sympathetic self-surrender: Jesus was a nice, middle-class Jewish boy from Nazareth. Now Mailer has returned to the right side, which is to say, the wrong side, of the tracks.

“The Castle in the Forest” — Mailer’s first novel in 10 years — is not just the almost superhumanly detached fulfillment of the somewhat depressed boast he made nearly half a century ago in “Advertisements for Myself”: “I wish to attempt an entrance into the mysteries of murder, suicide, incest, orgy, orgasm and Time.” This remarkable novel about the young Adolf Hitler, his family and their shifting circumstances, is Mailer’s most perfect apprehension of the absolutely alien. No wonder it is narrated by a devil. Mailer doesn’t inhabit these historical figures so much as possess them.

In “The Castle in the Forest,” the devil-narrator — who is living in the body of an SS man named Dieter — tells a little tale about the tale he is telling. “It is more than a memoir and certainly has to be most curious as a biography since it is as privileged as a novel. I do possess the freedom to enter many a mind.” Those two sentences form the crux of Mailer’s originality.

FOR Mailer, a novelist fanatically committed to the truth, the problem of the ego’s relation to other people has been for many years now the problem of the narrator’s relation to his material. In his eyes, writing must be an authentic presentation of the self.

As Mailer sees it, great writing puts before the reader life’s harshest enigmas with clarity and compassion. “The novelist is out there early with a particular necessity that may become the necessity of us all,” he has written. “It is to deal with life as something God did not offer us as eternal and immutable. Rather, it is our human destiny to enlarge what we were given. Perhaps we are meant to clarify a world which is always different in one manner or another from the way we have seen it on the day before.”

And once you have authentically presented yourself in your writing, you can no longer practice the expedience of concealing yourself as a person. So Mailer the man has — sometimes not happily — transgressed social norms, just as his books have crashed through the boundaries of alien identity and literary genre. Yet for all the cross-pollination between his art and his life, Mailer has always insisted on true art as a form of honest living. The writer, as he once put it, “can grow as a person or he can shrink. ... His curiosity, his reaction to life must not diminish. The fatal thing is to shrink, to be interested in less, sympathetic to less, desiccating to the point where life itself loses its flavor, and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste.”

Mailer has never, like the dandy, tried to live aesthetically. When he stabbed his wife at a party in 1960 and when he helped get released from prison a literarily gifted killer who then stabbed an aspiring young playwright to death, it was because he followed the wrong impulses, not the wrong ideas. He never committed the ugliness of insinuating that he screwed up for art’s sake. He let the ugliness and the imprudence of his actions speak for themselves.

Mailer did heedlessly write — in the notorious essay “The White Negro” (published in the democratic-socialist journal Dissent, a most decent, un-notorious little magazine) — that the hypothetical murder of a middle-aged shopkeeper by two hoodlums was an example of “daring the unknown,” of “trying to create a new nervous system,” of “looking for the opportunity to grow up a second time.” It is widely assumed that Mailer was trying to shock the bourgeoisie with a sympathy for violence. But if you read the essay all the way through, you see that he was doing something else: trying to shock the respectable class with an imaginative inhabitation of the violent. Rather than advocating murder, Mailer was exercising his perfect sense of the other — in this instance, “the psychopathic personality” that, he theorized, “may indeed be the perverted and dangerous front-runner of a new kind of personality, which could become the central expression of human nature before the 20th century is over.” Such wild empathy is an insult to the everyday solipsism of “decent” self-interest that sees evil and shrugs. Anyway, how many writers would dare to sacrifice the appearance of sanity for the sake of absolute emotional and intellectual transparency?

A truthful modern writer who possesses the shamanistic “freedom to enter many a mind” might choose to answer the hyperskeptical, Freudian-influenced modern reader’s question: “So who is doing the entering?” In other words, what is the nature of this particular writer’s authority? The postmodernists answer the question by installing layers of artistic self-consciousness inside the work itself. For decades, Mailer has been answering it existentially. “We perceive the truth of a novel by way of the personality of the writer,” he wrote in the introduction to “The Time of Our Time,” a selection of his work published in 1998. “That is the flavor of fiction. We observe the observer.”

So, to allow readers to observe the observer, Mailer writes a novel followed by a nonfiction book that illuminates his state of mind behind the preceding novel; composes essays outlining obsessions that shape his fictions; makes a literal rendering, animated by the novelist’s special clairvoyance, of a real event that Mailer himself lived through and acted in — he swings (“for to swing is to communicate, is to convey the rhythms of one’s own being to a lover, a friend or an audience”) from reports on boxing, Marilyn Monroe, the moon landing and John F. Kennedy, to polemics against feminism and scientific technology, to reflections on totalitarianism from the right and the left, to fiction about socialism, McCarthyism, Hollywood, high society, Lee Harvey Oswald, ancient Egypt and the C.I.A. Mailer’s ambition to “turn the consciousness of our time,” as he once put it, drove the symbolic combustions of private and public life in his early novels “Barbary Shore” and “The Deer Park.” It’s what incited him to run for mayor of New York in 1969.

This restless vastness of Mailer’s ambition (“In motion a man has a chance”) is such that his “failures” are seminal, his professional setbacks groundbreaking. His willingness to fail — hugely, magnificently, life-affirmingly — expands artistic possibilities. Then, too, point to any contemporary literary trend — the collapse of the novel into memoir; the fictional treatment of actual events; the blurred boundaries of “history as a novel, the novel as history” (the subtitle of “The Armies of the Night”) — and there is Mailer, pioneering, perfecting or pulling apart the form.

In fact, he has lived and written so impulsively that his life and his writing each need the other to be completed. That itself conveys a brutal honesty about the limitations of life, and of writing. Or as Mailer once wonderfully and bizarrely complained: “It is not demanding to write about characters considerably more defeated than oneself since the writer’s ego is rarely in danger of being punished by too much self-perception.” In politics, this is called “accountability.” Mailer’s emotional and psychological transparency make his work a kind of ersatz democracy.

One way to take the measure of a writer is by considering the weight, quality and consistency of his obsessions. Mailer, from the beginning, has had a rage for what he calls “nakedness.” It is a passion for emptying his psyche onto the table in front of the reader, much as a person who has just been arrested will be ordered by the police to empty his pockets as he is being booked.

Indeed, Mailer loves freedom so ambitiously that he is never free of the feeling of not being free. Here is Mailer in “The Deer Park,” a Hollywood tale so caustic and seemingly unmediated by art that reading it is, in places, like listening to Maria Callas become all the more vivid as Aida by vulnerably failing to hit her high notes: “The unspoken purpose of freedom was to find love, yet when love was found one could only desire freedom again.” Of the sudden fame and fortune that came to him with the publication of his first book at the age of 25, Mailer wryly recalled: “My farewell to an average man’s experience was too abrupt; never again would I know, in the dreary way one usually knows such things, what it was like to work at a dull job or take orders from a man one hated.” His feeling that early success cut him off from vital, common experience may explain why he has kept diving so purposefully, and extremely, back into experience.

The inaugural book was “The Naked and the Dead,” and it was the first instance of Mailer’s obsession with being “naked” in public.

Mailer originally used the title for a play based on his brief employment in a mental institution during his college years at Harvard. He chose it again for his epic tale about World War II, inspired by his service as a rifleman, among other duties, in the South Pacific. Nakedness in this novel means the dehumanizing process by which war’s atmosphere of death strips soldiers down to their bare, defenseless essence as mortal beings. In war, men are returned to their original state; they are reborn helplessly into the world. Inter faeces et urinam.

But as his career evolved, Mailer began to invest the word with a contrary import. Nakedness came to mean the way Mailer the man and the writer bared his impulses, desires, instincts and thoughts — mortality as a cry of defiance against mortality. Nakedness in public, saying the unsayable, becomes a form of power.

Mailer’s divulgences involve writing about his envy, bitterness, selfishness and greed, about the effect of the slings and arrows rained down on his own lustful, fearful, grasping, always faltering, always charging ego. In “Advertisements for Myself,” Mailer rued the critic-inflicted wounds that resulted in “three or four years of constipated work, lack of confidence, cowardly sweetness and bouts of churlishness”; took vicious measure of rivals like Bellow (“I cannot take him seriously as a major novelist”), Styron, Salinger and Baldwin, among others; and reprinted the belligerent inscription he’d written on a copy of “The Deer Park” that he sent Hemingway. Papa’s failure to acknowledge it “helped to push me further and deeper into the next half year of bold assertions, half-done work, unbalanced heroics and an odd notoriety of my own choice.” Has any consequential American writer scoured himself so thoroughly and alarmingly in public? Mailer writes like a Puritan without a superego.

To Mailer’s mind, such self-exposure earned him the entitlement to write about other people’s envy, bitterness, selfishness and greed. This is how he addressed his Greenwich Village readers in 1956, in the first column he wrote for The Village Voice, which he had recently co-founded: “That many of you are frustrated in your ambitions, and undernourished in your pleasures, only makes you more venomous. ... Nevertheless, given your general animus to those more talented than yourselves, the only way I see myself becoming one of the cherished traditions of the Village is to be actively disliked each week.” He was probably right; still, that was one short-lived column. The assaults of his reviewers also justified Mailer’s own ferocity in criticism. In his antifeminist tirade, “The Prisoner of Sex,” he lashes Kate Millet: “The yaws of her distortion were nicely hidden by the smudge pots of her indignation.”

Baring your private demons in order to expose other people’s — including your rivals’ — has been for Mailer a type of anti-macho courage. He set out to map the dark underside of the American ego just as Hemingway had anatomized American nerve. In a country openly driven by self-interest and self-absorption, the ego’s hidden bruises and connivings are too fundamental to be openly discussed.

Reflecting in the 1950s on his “fear of homosexuality,” Mailer wrote that “I could kill this inhibition only by jumping into the middle of the problem without any clothes.” That is, only by confessing his aversion and apologizing for it in print, which he did, bravely, in “Advertisements for Myself.” Nakedness again. Throughout his career, Mailer has eccentrically, 19th-centurily, associated any self-repression with death by cancer. (When Susan Sontag protested figurative interpretations of physical disease in “Illness as Metaphor,” she was, to a large extent, responding to Mailer.) Mailer is one of the last Western writers to create a self-contained intellectual universe out of strong, idiosyncratic convictions about the relationship between spiritual, psychic and social existence. In his autonomous creative world, heterosexual anal sex is the power-replenishing and very good (for the man) alternative to banal sex; masturbation is power-depleting and very bad; homosexuality is regrettable, but dignified; condoms are dreadful (a conclusion reached in the era before AIDS); and unprotected sexual intercourse between a man and a woman is What It Is All About. And that’s just sex. According to Mailer, technology makes us strut like puffed-up little gods and sucks the air out of intellect and will.

Ours is an age of mockery and sarcasm, when even irony is belittled for being secretly sincere about its lack of conviction. People wring their hands over the Fate of the Novel, but no one seems comfortable with a novelistic approach — i.e., a universalizing intuition expanding through a fresh perception — in nonfiction. Mailer’s theories are the hyperorganizing overflow of a novelist’s mind, which by its nature leaps back and forth between intuition and experience. As he puts it, there is little he has written, “even when it comes under the formal category of nonfiction or argument, that has not derived, then, from my understanding of how one writes fiction.” And so, “fiction, as I use the word, is a reality that does not cohere to received axes of fact but is breathed in through the swarm of our male and female movements about one another.”

To not cohere to received axes of fact — magical phrase! — to approach life novelistically, is to make connections between the visible and the invisible world, and to transfigure the commonplace. We now are drowning in mind-numbing literature of the commonplace: tipping points, hive minds, “freakonomics,” “bobos in paradise” — it is all lifestyle trends, marketing techniques, cheap behavioral psychology and glib social-pattern-spotting. This flood of minutiae makes one long for Mailer’s heroic attempts to invest experience with a higher meaning, no matter how far-out or unacceptable some of his connections between seen and unseen might be. Even if such notions offend household pieties, they have the effect of making you return fully awake to first principles that had begun to make you snore. And when Mailer’s connections work, they are beyond good.

In his book about Marilyn Monroe, he wrote, “Since sex is, after all, the most special form of human communication, and the technological society is built on expanding communication in much the way capitalism was built on the expansive properties of capital and money, the perspective is toward greater promiscuity.” If you are seeking an explanation for why pornography takes up most of the Internet, there it is.

At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Mailer observed that some of Mayor Richard Daley’s “Illinois goons” had “eyes like drills; others, noses like plows; jaws like amputated knees.” Reporting on the Republican convention in Miami, in that same year, Mailer observed that Nelson Rockefeller “had only one flaw — an odd and unpleasant mouth, a catfish mouth, wide, unnaturally wide with very thin lips. In the center of the mouth there seemed almost another mouth which did the speaking.” In all of these transfiguring passages, Mailer bores into familiar particulars and comes out on the other side with a poetic singularity.

This capacity to draw out new meaning from personalities and events may explain why Mailer is the only major American novelist to be really canny about politics. The subject worked Bellow up into sulfurous apocalyptics; it turns Updike coy and indifferent; it transforms savage, uncontainable Roth into a good old-fashioned Upper West Side liberal. But Mailer’s wild empathy endows his vintage political writing with a wild, visceral prescience.

He understands, for example, that consummate insiders are often temperamental outsiders — outlaws in the good or bad sense of the word. Here he is on John Erlichmann’s testimony before the Senate Watergate Committee in July 1973, in which an outsider’s character and dignity suddenly upended the insider’s sordid malfeasance: “He acted as if he were proud to be on the side he was on; his pride was what could not be suffered. For it spoke of a world whose real complexity could savage a liberal brain. Liberals could certainly live with the hot idea that they were fighting Mephisto’s own Nixon, but they couldn’t support the Kierkegaardian complexity that the good guys might be right next to the bad guys on the same team.” A lesser writer would treat the insider/outsider paradox as merely a lesson in hypocrisy. For Mailer it is further proof that the world “is always different in one manner or another from the way we have seen it on the day before.” His grasp of power’s myriad facets gives some of his political predictions a visionary accuracy.

Almost 40 years ago, in “The Armies of the Night,” Mailer characterized himself as a “left conservative,” thus envisioning a syncretic position that is now the holy grail of the best ideological aspiration. At the 1968 Republican convention, gazing at the legions of conservatives around him, Mailer realized that their faith “existed in those crossroads between the psyche and the heart where love, hate, the cognition of grace, the all but lost sense of the root, and adoration of America congregate for some.” He was the first serious liberal to take conservatives seriously — that is to say, novelistically. At his best (his post-9/11 politics have taken a turn into a kind of forced occultism), he writes about America as though he were an expatriate living in a Beautiful Idea of America, from which exile he notates the shadowy degrees between ideal and real.

No political foresight of Mailer’s can surpass the prediction he made in 1962, at the height of the cold war, in a debate with William F. Buckley Jr.: “So let the true war begin. It is not a war between West and East, between capitalism and Communism, or democracy and totalitarianism; it is rather the deep war which has gone on for six centuries in the nature of Western man, it is the war between the conservative and the rebel, between authority and instinct.” It was, he went on, “the war we can expect if the cold war will end. It is the war that will take life and power from the center and give it over to left and to right, it is the war that will teach us our meaning.” And he said this before the cultural conflagrations ignited by the ’60s, which burn deeper and wider now.

One quality separates Mailer from many of his heavy-hitting contemporaries. He went to war. The Army revealed to Mailer the variety and breadth of American society. But war made him a storyteller who has a deep mistrust of narrative.

The sprawl and chaos of battle are not unlike the sprawl and chaos of a human life — or on a larger scale, democracy itself. In “The Naked and the Dead,” Mailer wrote a classic narrative. But then, as though the war had gradually seeped through his nerves into his imagination, Mailer’s novels slowly moved away from conventional plots and story lines. The stunningly compressed social-sexual symmetries of “Barbary Shore,” “The Deer Park” and “An American Dream” burst into the form-exploding streams of consciousness in “Why Are We in Vietnam?” and then were stretched into long, messy, fictionalized actual lives and events in the controlled chaos and sprawl of “The Executioner’s Song,” “Ancient Evenings” (a flawed tour-de-force of alien inhabitation) and “Harlot’s Ghost.”

The greatest of these is “The Executioner’s Song,” which tells the true story of Gary Gilmore, a man doomed to violence who spent half his life in jail and, upon his release, murdered two men in cold blood. Sentenced to death row, Gilmore could have staved off execution indefinitely by legal means, but instead tried to kill himself several times, defied his lawyers’ attempts to appeal and finally insisted on being put to death by firing squad. The uncanny dynamic driving the book gradually shifts from portraying Gilmore as a violent mythomaniac at war with society, to depicting a ruthlessly mythologizing media at war with Gilmore’s ragged soul, as Gilmore himself works the levers of mass spectacle. Once back in jail, the consummate outsider discovers he has an insider’s temperament — inside prison, having become a media sensation, he discovers the quiddity of America’s madness.

With its breathtaking panorama sweeping from the country’s small-time depths to its big-time shallows, “The Executioner’s Song” was like “The Naked and the Dead” stateside — or, given Mailer’s heightened powers at the midpoint of his career, “War and Peace” translated into the Great American Novel. The book’s sprawl made it the anti-“In Cold Blood”: where Capote pressed his real-life tale into a neat narrative, Mailer let his naturally respire through the billion pores of its accumulated, enveloping facts. The language is flat, smooth, shaved down, as if Mailer had produced his words by running a carpenter’s plane over reality. It is the fulfillment of Hemingway’s style: it has the same spare, unforgiving, unflinching neutrality, but without Hemingway’s deliberate literary manner. In an inspired stroke, Mailer separates his paragraphs with a double space, making them the typographical equivalent of Gilmore’s Utah County, where “the desert was at the end of every street.” The technique also lets him capture how American experience seems to consist of disconnected moments, each one possessing an isolated magnitude, as though you were advancing minute by minute into the future out of no past, from one eternal present to another.

In “The Executioner’s Song,” Mailer at last found the right relationship of the narrator to his material. He completely effaces his personality, but because the environment he recreates brims with his much publicized themes and obsessions — sex, violence, power, repression, displacement; all in the pursuit of happiness — the story itself becomes an actor in Mailer’s pre-existing universe. The novel is free of his presence and full of his presence, overtly self-surrendering and subtly self-assertive, written not in the first- or third- but in a kind of spectral fourth-person. Mailer the author becomes as simultaneously real and unreal as Gilmore — as America itself.

For all that, the bounty of “The Executioner’s Song” is its compassion: neither sentimental nor judgmental; large-hearted in its poise and reserve. The book has no marginal or “flat” characters. Each figure possesses the roundness of his or her real life. Perhaps that’s why so many sentences in “The Executioner’s Song” begin with a proper name or pronoun. The overflowing force of Mailer’s egotism endows him with respect for the power and capacity of other people’s egos. But his rarest and most precious quality is that he is able to see the most alien people in the familiar way they see themselves. Which brings us to Mailer’s new novel.

Toward the end of “The Castle in the Forest,” Dieter, the novel’s devil-narrator, imagines a question from the reader: “Dieter, where is the link to your text? There is a lot of forest in your story but where is the castle?”

Dieter replies that in German “The Castle in the Forest” is das Waldschloss, a name, he says, that some Jews gave to the particular concentration camp in which they were imprisoned. In fact, Dieter explains, “Waldschloss sits on the empty plain of what was once a potato field. Not many trees are in sight, nor any hint of a castle. Nothing of interest is on the horizon. Waldschloss became, therefore, the appellation given by the brightest of the prisoners to their compound. One pride maintained to the end was that they must not surrender their sense of irony. That had become their fortitude. It should come as no surprise that the prisoners who came up with this piece of nomenclature were from Berlin.”

Dieter’s weird and unique riff on the nature of German irony follows, and for the sake of understanding this richly enigmatic book it has to be quoted in full: “German came to us originally as the language of simple folk, good pagan brutes and husbandmen, tribal people, ready for the hunt and the field. So it is a language full of the growls of the stomach and the wind in the bowels of hearty existence, the bellows of the lungs, the hiss of the windpipe, the cries of command that one issues to domesticated animals, even the roar that stirs in the throat at the sight of blood. Given, however, the imposition laid on this folk through the centuries — that they be ready to enter the amenities of Western civilization before the opportunity passes away from them altogether — I do not find it surprising that many of the German bourgeoisie who had migrated into city life from muddy barnyards did their best to speak in voices as soft as the silk of a sleeve. Particularly, the ladies.” He adds: “To every sharp German fellow, however, particularly the Berliners, irony had to become the essential corrective.”

“The Castle in the Forest” is a story about simple folk and good pagan brutes from the muddy barnyard, a tale narrated by a devil whose voice is soft as the silk of a sleeve, and written in the spirit of a corrective irony. The young Adolf Hitler, his parents, siblings, stepsiblings and extended family are stuck in the sty of their instincts, immediate gratifications, primitive fears and terrors, yet nearly each of them — the men, especially — feels that he is living a noble, honorable, admirable life.

Mailer the wild empathizer, the maestro of the human ego, is keen and blunt about these delusions — what, in effect, are the deceptively homey psychological origins of evil. At one point the devil says: “We are keyed to look for excess of every kind,” and “every exaggeration of honest sentiment is there to serve our aims.” Elsewhere he notes: “People had to be wary of feeling too saintly, since they could not be certain of the source of such feelings. They could be working for Satan.” And also: “Rare was the man or woman who did not possess an intense sense of the injustice done to them each day. It was our taproot to every adult. It was a fury in every child.” The “ability to wall up the most unpalatable facts about oneself will always elicit my unwilling admiration.”

These walled-in sentiments produce in the Hitlers (their name passed through various changes) the delusion that their conscience inhabits a castle, when in fact, they are so subject to the primal ooze of their feelings that they resemble trees fixed in nature’s irresistible forces. “The Castle in the Forest” is an intricately constructed novel, and one of its recurrent motifs is the explicit comparison of people to trees. The devil finds the “taproot” to his clients. After (unforgettably described) sex with Adolf’s future father, Alois Schicklgruber, Hitler’s future mother, Klara Poelzl, experiences a guilt that is “as heavy as a waterlogged tree.” Another character is “bent by now as a tree that has faced too much wind for too many years.” At one point, Mailer potently describes woods in which there were “not too many tortured shapes to suggest the aftermath of crazy storms when the trees were young.” In a travesty of nature and procreation, the young Adolf Hitler likes to masturbate on leaves.

Somewhere along the line, Dieter remarks on “that curious human nature, which forces its way into existence between the hazards of urine and excrement, yet will later dream each night of a noble life.” Inter faeces et urinam, another of this novel’s themes, is a further twist on “nakedness” and on mortal helplessness. These tree-people remain stuck infantlike in the waste amid which they were born — Alois, the pathologically womanizing customs official; Klara, his wife and niece, who hides in the folds of escapist religious piety her instinctive knowledge that she is in fact Alois’s daughter; Adolf, whose onanistic sessions are like “being shot out of his own cannon.” They are all — spiritually, emotionally and mentally — as naked as the day they came into the world. In the case of Adolf, he will defensively transmute his naked helplessness into a perverted egotism: the terrible power that he will wreak on other human beings.

Mailer is pretty faithful to the outlines of Hitler’s life, though for some reason he makes Adolf’s sister Paula retarded, when in reality she was not. (Nor was there ever a concentration camp referred to as Waldschloss.) Mailer does take two considerable liberties. He gives Hitler only one testicle, and makes him the product of father-daughter incest. Rumors of both began circulating after Hitler’s suicide in 1945; Mailer makes actual what no one can prove or disprove. The incest is essential to Mailer’s purpose. Ever since Wagner celebrated the brother-sister coupling of Siegmund and Sieglinde in “Die Walküre” — a superlove greater than piddly human morality, etc. — some Nazis had thrilled to the idea of hatching the master race in the family rec room, a disagreeable impulse they then projected outward onto their image of depraved, incestuous Jews.

For Mailer, incest represents the sick inversion of everything he cherishes: expansion of the self beyond one’s origins; the gift of empathy with the other; the ability to sublimate love into work and vice versa. Even the Hitler family’s most strenuous attempt at the last backfires. Alois’s passion to redeem his life with work as a beekeeper turns disastrously into a warped lesson in crushing utilitarianism and social control — a lesson not lost on young “Adi.” Nature itself, unresisted by an enlightened human will, backfires. The real “castle” is the repulsive parody of a castle: the squalid hut of a master beekeeper called Der Alte, a sadist and child molester who is the most consequential of Adolf’s twisted mentors.

Insofar as the forest represents natural goodness (Mailer beautifully has the devil suggest that “even processed paper still contains an ineluctable hint of the tenderness God put into his trees” ), “forest” and “castle” are, you might say, the two poles of Mailer’s work and life. The popular conception of Mailer sees only the former: unrestrained expression of impulses and instincts; sex as freedom; absolute candor as ineluctable hint of God’s presence. But Mailer is also an immensely disciplined craftsman and stylist who has spent the larger portion of his life working at the writer’s trade. He is a castle builder expert in the different paths along which people can wander and become lost in a forest without a castle, and yet trick themselves into thinking that they inhabit a resplendent fortress or chateau. Perhaps in some subtle way, he wants in this late novel to make clear the difference between tortured, and mostly sublimated, obsession with sex and violence — a nice Jewish boy’s boxing match with repression — and the compulsive sex and violence that are the true mark of a repressed nature.

Over the gates to Auschwitz hung a sign that said, with inhuman irony, “Arbeit Macht Frei.” Work makes you free. By titling his castle-less book “The Castle in the Forest,” Mailer has created, with infinitely human irony, the inner story of the deluded minds that, inadvertently and not, laid the road that led to Auschwitz. Some critics may exaggerate Mailer’s occasional easy moral equivalences, and his handful of dog-eared, though hardly invalid, allusions to the diabolical nature of art. They may also mistake the presence of his hallmark obsessions for narcissistic anachronism — in which case they will not only fail to enjoy the devil’s fabulous cadenza on bad odors and the nature of evil, but be blind to the role of sexuality in human history. They will also miss the profound moral engagement of this book. Mailer has imagined himself into a raw propinquity to evil without losing either his nerve or his humanity. He uses his sense of the other to inhabit people devoid (except for the otherworldly Dieter) of his other-apprehending gift.

There is no weary celebration of the demonic here, no facile declaration of evil’s universal latency. Mailer, who believes in God and the Devil the way Greeks and Romans believed in meddling supernatural rivals, has never had sympathy for the Devil, and he has none here. “Our aim, after all,” Dieter says of Satan’s purposes, “was to keep reducing human possibilities.” Far from being a smooth minion of dapper Mephistopheles, Dieter is, for one thing, an awful storyteller. To readers unwilling to have the novel interrupted by Dieter’s account of his assignment to the coronation of Nicholas II in Russia — Mailer’s Tolstoyan reimagination of that time and event — Dieter says sloppily: “Just turn to Page 261. Adolf Hitler’s story will pick up again right there.” Mailer has contempt for this devil, surpassed only by his loathing for young Adolf. Yet Mailer is also in awe of the devil’s multifarious nature. Dieter coquettishly insinuates that he wishes to betray Satan and go over to the side of the “Dummkopf,” a name Satan insists his legions call God so as to conjure a derisive image of a being who has a great, magnetic claim on their respect. (Mailer would be a fearsome adversary in the arena of office politics.) It is Dieter’s very complexity — “real complexity could savage a liberal brain” — that inflames Mailer and which he thus conscientiously evokes. Dieter says, “Yet is it not also true that one cannot find a devil who will not work both sides of the street?” The use of a triple negative to express evil’s protean and malleable nature, with its echo of Christ being thrice denied, is itself a multifarious malediction on evil, rising into art from the heave and toss of Mailer’s temperament. Alone among American writers, Mailer has earned the right to use a triple negative. So let it be said, once and for all: Norman Mailer is a rebellious angel who never fell. Whoever told him that he has fallen, got it; in the words of the younger Mailer to that other type of Nazi, they got it all. They are getting it again, in this utterly strange work of naked, wild empathy.