The hardest thing about watching Norman Mailer reprise his public role as a loudmouthed buffoon is seeing the damage his performance has done to his newest novel, The Castle in the Forest. Mailer has been taking the stage in this part for, it is hard to believe, sixty years, since the publication of The Naked and the Dead in 1948. For sixty years he’s been bullying his way to the front of the proscenium and bellowing forth one self-indulgent diatribe after another. For sixty years he’s been picking fights and manufacturing front-page vendettas, refusing to allow a single cultural phenomenon to pass without weighing in, in terms sufficiently coarse and supercilious to somehow make every spectacle in part about him—and rather conveniently timing these irruptions to coincide with the publication of a new book.