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The Mailer Review/Volume 1, 2007/Mailer’s Choice: Difference between revisions
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{{Quote box|title=''The Castle in the Forest''|By [[Norman Mailer]]<br />New York: Random House, 2007<br />477 pp. Cloth $27.95.|align=right|width=25%}} | {{Quote box|title=''The Castle in the Forest''|By [[Norman Mailer]]<br />New York: Random House, 2007<br />477 pp. Cloth $27.95.|align=right|width=25%}} | ||
{{Byline|last=Solomon|first=Barbara Probst|url=https://prmlr.us/ | {{Byline|last=Solomon|first=Barbara Probst|url=https://prmlr.us/mr01sol}} | ||
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. | {{start|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. | ||
I, like many of Mailer’s admirers, come from a secular background, and was therefore somewhat surprised when the feisty critic Lionel Abel, several years before he died, remarked to me in that thinky way his crowd of New York intellectuals had, “Religion was a big idea — Marxism was a big idea — what have we now to equal the power of those beliefs?” I mulled over what he said, and it struck me how, in one way or another, the writers I most admire, the big ones intent on creating an entire universe in their work, tend to have a roomy view of the world, leaving space for forces beyond rationalism. In many ways they should be part of the dialogue about ''The Castle in the Forest''. Borrowing a bit from Tom Stoppard’s habit of reassembling writers arguing with one another, as their views are part of the twentieth century dialogue that formed us, specifically in regard to the Holocaust, I let their voices filter through my head in my head as I pondered Mailer’s choice to use God and the Devil as part of the central cast in ''Castle''. | I, like many of Mailer’s admirers, come from a secular background, and was therefore somewhat surprised when the feisty critic Lionel Abel, several years before he died, remarked to me in that thinky way his crowd of New York intellectuals had, “Religion was a big idea — Marxism was a big idea — what have we now to equal the power of those beliefs?” I mulled over what he said, and it struck me how, in one way or another, the writers I most admire, the big ones intent on creating an entire universe in their work, tend to have a roomy view of the world, leaving space for forces beyond rationalism. In many ways they should be part of the dialogue about ''The Castle in the Forest''. Borrowing a bit from Tom Stoppard’s habit of reassembling writers arguing with one another, as their views are part of the twentieth century dialogue that formed us, specifically in regard to the Holocaust, I let their voices filter through my head in my head as I pondered Mailer’s choice to use God and the Devil as part of the central cast in ''Castle''. | ||