Norman Mailer, Part II

The Castle in the Forest (Random House)

In the second of this two-part conversation about the bureaucratic, dim-witted culture that characterized the German provinces of Hitler's childhood, Mailer reveals that his narrator, an assistant to the devil, is himself a bureaucrat. Bureaucracy becomes the model for the world of this novel, down to the smallest detail—the beehives kept by Hitler's father. Mailer waxes hilarious about the sexual behavior of bees.