At RSB Carey Harrison has a nice post on The Kindly Ones. Carey takes into account Daniel Mendelsohn's lengthy, considered review in the NYRB, and both Carey and Daniel try to understand why Littell has made his book so dirty.
Here's some of Carey's take:
Mendelsohn’s conclusion grants The Kindly Ones a majestic, honourable defeat in pursuit of the indescribable. To my knowledge, he is the only reviewer so far to have seriously tried to assess how the hero’s ghastly secret crimes, and his almost unbearably twisted soul, could be convincingly aligned with classical literary virtues of Littell’s painstaking evocation of a man steadily succumbing to indifference, amid a horror in which he is participating. This horror alone, the horror of Babi Yar and of Auschwitz, is so memorably imagined that even without the Pelion of Aue’s inner corruption being piled upon the Ossa of the Holocaust, many readers will have turned away in revulsion. For Mendelsohn, Littell’s choice to make his hero a monster cleaves the book down the middle and leaves it scarred by a gigantic, self-inflicted wound. The New York Review of Books pays tribute to Littell’s literary antecedents, and to Littell’s own debts to Aeschylus and to pre-Christian concepts of tragic destiny. Yet the book itself remains, for Mendelsohn, a monster; it can only be redeemed by being called impossible, with a sanctifying reference to Blanchot’s estimate of Moby-Dick. Without resort to such eminences I should like to make a simpler argument for the strategic coherence of the book.
To see the book as monstrously divided is almost to grasp the literary strategy Littell has so provocatively employed. For in order to plumb the Nazi psyche – and this is quite unmistakably The Kindly Ones’s purpose, despite all the reviews that treat the book as a ‘Holocaust novel’ – it will not do to make a visit to Hell in the person of an ‘ordinary,’ representative human being. . . .
It's not terribly surprising that coverage of this book is being split among those who get it and those who, like Michiko Kakutani, are happy to wear their philistinism on their sleeve and condemn it without anything more than recourse to its transgressive nature.
Let me be clear that by "get it" I don't mean people who rapturously acclaim Littell's book (Mendelsohn, for instance, is quite critical). Rather, I'm speaking of people whose critique can demonstrate that they read the book closely enough to do more than complain about its scatological content.
