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From The Times Literary Supplement Feb 14 2007
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.
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.