[Re: Simpson's "If I Did It"] It is a book out of which no one comes off well, its real-life clichéd characters clattering like empty bottles. (James Wolcott in Vanity Fair).
And ...
[Re: Mailer's "The Castle in the Forest," a fictionalized account of Hitler's youth} All I know is that a third of the way through I knew that finishing the novel would be like trying to dig a tunnel with my bare hands, and that reviewing it would require tunneling back and submitting a piece that would betray the heavy slog of obligation. (Wolcott in his Vanity Fair blog).
And ...
The narration of The Castle in the Forest is such a creaky, padded performance embedded with winking ironies that it's like listening to a Germanic Lionel Barrymore. I'm also apathetic-to-unsympathetic (depending on my fickle mood) regarding Mailer's cosmology; I accept evil in the world, but not as the designer product of the Devil presiding over it like the grand marshall of the Rose Bowl parade. (Wolcott blog).
And indefinitely it is not far :)
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