Lennon: Can you say something about The Castle in the Forest as a way of perceiving history? How is it different from other historical novels?
Mailer: I think the large difference is embodied in the narrator. Off hand, I can’t name a serious novel where an Assistant to the Devil is the one to tell the tale, but I found the choice curiously liberating. It allowed me to enter people’s minds at will, which is of course one of the strengths of nineteenth-century fiction. You can go into any mind the author chooses to enter, and so are able to live with the characters as they appear on the surface, and also as they feel within. Of course, those novels were corseted by nineteenth-century moral strictures. Sexual lines of inquiry were hardly pursued.