The Castle in the Forest
Adam Mars-Jones is not too impressed with Norman Mailer's first novel in a decade or so. In a review at The Guardian he says
The book is highly impressive for long stretches, but its flaws are perverse and even preposterous. It dies the death of a thousand cuts from self-inflicted wounds to intelligibility, but the punctures are all in the insistent, maddeningly silly cosmological framework.
(...)
There has never been a shortage of embittered fantasists, after all. The cautionary part of the story is the one that Mailer doesn't tell, the process whereby one such figure managed to impose himself on a society supersaturated with grievance and rancour.



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