Next time you visit the doctor, notice how the grilling you used to get about your bad habits has subsided to an inquiry into your family tree. Science increasingly values the past as medical prologue and—as all unhappy families are unique—seeks ever more maladies in the folds of DNA.

In The Family that Couldn’t Sleep (Random House), D.T. Max traces an obscure brain disease caused by prions, the same mysteriously malformed proteins responsible for mad-cow. The disorder has terrorized a family in northern Italy since the 18th century with an implacable insomnia, and consequently an early and agonizing death. Through digressions into the pedophiliac forefather of prion research and the Malthusian calculus of cattle ranching, Max illuminates what he calls “possibly the worst disease in the world,” and the search for an elusive cure. The author also insinuates how little has changed in the last 200 years; neurologists today come off as barely more effective than the mountebanks and witch doctors of the Venetian Rialto.

In My Blood, a history-cum-memoir by novelist (and 02138 contributor) John Sedgwick (HarperCollins, January), chronicles his family’s history of depression. It begins with the author contemplating suicide, abortively of course. But the suggestion becomes his Proustian madeleine, drawing him back to the Revolutionary origins of his patrician Boston family, many of whose members have met unhappily imbalanced ends. The narrative spans centuries and generations, snaking a leafy path in and out of tony New England towns, Groton, the Porcellian, melancholy, and the psychiatric ward. It pauses at every juncture of American history, with disconnected but lovely vignettes of the famous Sedgwicks: from Speaker of the House Theodore and domestic novelist Catharine down to Warhol apparatchik Edie, the author’s cousin, and namedropping liberally along the way (even W.E.B. Du Bois was descended from Theodore’s famous servant Mumbet). Gibbon called the historian’s “I” the “most disgusting of pronouns,” but Sedgwick avoids arbitrary self-promotion, merging with the past by way of the crippling dejection that follows each generation like a limping vengeance. He suggests the genetic origin of the disease, which, he says “seems to be the place we’re from,” and extrapolates its effects from his ancestors’ broad epistolary habits and a novelist’s imagination.

If Sedgwick’s personal history reads like a novel, the new novel by Norman Mailer, his first in a decade, is a kind of personalized history. The Castle in the Forest (Random House, January) treads on worn biographical ground—Adolf Hitler’s—but only from conception to adolescence. Mailer suggests, though elliptically, a sort of genetic origin to evil itself, by tracing Hitler to a covertly incestuous marriage; the almost comically provocative premise is sugared by a demonic narrator’s histrionic descriptions of the Hitler family. Where Hannah Arendt marveled at the banality of the evil Eichmann, Mailer’s Hitler is a monster explicable only through a strange combination of supernatural forces and a Freudian nightmare, which together form the novel’s loud background.

The author of The Naked and the Dead deserves a high seat in America’s literary pantheon, but this novel represents the worst of Mailer, familiar already from his Christ parody, The Gospel According to the Son: bizarre philosophical canards, silly anti-Americanism, and soft-core pornography with class overtones (“now and again from one of the maids or cooks, he would receive a nice wet surprise”). The details of little Adolf’s fecal fixation and extraordinary Oedipal mischief don’t (as may be alleged) belittle the tragedy of Nazism, but they amount to a combination of literary hubris and mishegas that sounds like a collective harrumph, in response to a valid consideration of the author’s legacy. A cursory read of the opening chapters of a decent biography of the dictator—like Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler—suggests that Mailer’s history is paranoid and untenable. But here, unlike at the doctor’s office, history is not important. The novel’s etiolated prose, half-sketched characters, and implausible, staccato leaps in thinking might make a more impatient reader half-nostalgic for the days when heredity was a chemical mystery—and trashy novels were burned.