Esquire’s feature on Norman Mailer is infuriatingly, mind-numbingly dull—now I remember why I stopped reading Esquire—but I found a few choice bits here and there, mostly pertaining to his newest novel The Castle in the Forest.

What it means, in the short term, is that he has a novel coming out. This might not sound like a big deal, given his productivity—he’s put his name to forty-five books, fiction and nonfiction—until you start to think of the other writers who went to war and who started writing novels when Mailer was publishing his first, the hugely successful The Naked and the Dead. I was going to say they’re either dead or silent, but really, now that William Styron is gone, they’re just dead—except for maybe Vonnegut. And here comes Mailer, not just writing a novel but writing something large and ambitious … no, writing something large and ambitious about Hitler … no, writing something large and ambitious about Hitler, narrated by the Devil.

[...]

You can look at just about any of his books and you will find him going on about a lot of the same things—masturbation, cancer, orgasm, psychopathology, and the ongoing struggle between the Devil and God—and The Castle in the Forest brings those ideas to a kind of logical conclusion. And the logical conclusion is Hitler. The Castle in the Forest is not just about Hitler; it’s about Hitler’s family and the forces that shaped Hitler into an artist of annihilation. But here’s the thing: in Mailer’s book about Hitler, the forces that shape Hitler are almost entirely Mailer’s obsessions. Mailer’s Hitler is a product of Mailer’s obsessions. Basically, the argument that Mailer makes is that Hitler is bad because he was created that way—because he is, as Mailer told me, “the second-most-quintessential birth in all of Christendom” and “the Devil’s answer to Jesus.”

I’m already yawning because Tom Junod somehow manages to make Norman Mailer look like the most boring author in the world, but how the hell is Adolf Hitler a “logical conclusion” to many of Mailer’s themes? Cancer, orgasm, and masturbation logically lead to Hitler? I don’t know whether to laugh at this guy or pin the blame on the magazine’s seemingly nonexistent editors. One thing’s sure: I can’t help but wonder what kind of creepy shit is hiding in Junod’s porn collection.