The anality of evil

by Stephen Abell

Norman Mailer
THE CASTLE IN THE FOREST
480pp. Little, Brown. £17.99.
978 0 316 86133 5
US: Random House. $27.95.
978 0 394 53649 1

In his preface to Music for Chameleons (1980), Truman Capote recalled that Norman Mailer had initially criticized his concept of the “nonfiction novel” as a “failure of the imagination”. Of course, it is typical of Mailer that he then went on to embrace this apparently unsuccessful medium for much of his career, culminating in Oswald’s Tale (1995), a forensic treatment of the killer of President Kennedy, which represented Mailer’s most successful sustained piece of writing for nearly fifty years. His recent, more traditionally novelistic efforts have also relied on a close connection to the real world, from Harlot’s Ghost (1991) to The Gospel According to the Son (1997), which gave us his versions of the CIA and Christ respectively. In fact, we may consider that Mailer is attracted to the mingling and mangling of life and fiction (what Nabokov called an “insult to both art and truth”) precisely because it can be so tellingly unsatisfying. After all, “it is impossible”, he has said, “to talk of a great artist without speaking of failure”. And in The Castle in the Forest we are continually reminded that Mailer and failure are never more than a half-rhyme apart.