Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW Santa Monica, I'm Michael Sulfroblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm very honored and happy to have us my guest, Norman Maylor, whose new novel, The Castle in the Forest, I think, is terrific and thrilling and unexpected because it's a change of style for Mailer.

I wanted to begin the other night I was reading a book of things that great novelists have said about the novel,

and I finally found one that seemed applicable.

Thomas Hardy said that the entire art of the novel is that you're looking for something

eternal and universal, but to write about the typical is boring. You have to find a monster or an anomaly whose behavior will reveal the typical.

And certainly in this book, which is a biography of the early years of Adolf Hitler up until age 16, we have a monster who reveals the typical.

Well, I would not necessarily agree altogether with Hardy's remark. That is, he's right that

whenever you have a monster and you can show the human side of the monster,

then you've done something for the art of the novel, and you've enriched people.

It seems to me that whenever the novel can increase our compassion,

it is absolutely worth reading because bad novels do not increase our compassion. They may jazz

our sentimentality, but sentimentality is a corrosive disease if you get into it. If anyone who

remains sentimental throughout their lives ends up having an empty bad ending, I would go so far as to

say. So what you want in a novel,

I always go back to Tolstoy's notion, which he didn't say, I've said it for him.

Well, no, what I say about Tolstoy is he was able to be immensely severe and yet compassionate

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