Psychology and the modern novel

I have spent the weekend completing some leisure reading. I finished The Shallows by Nicholas Carr and am a quarter of the way through an English translation of Les Bienveillantes by Jonathan Littell. The English title for the novel is The Kindly Ones. The narrator Max Au takes the reader on a harrowing tour of the mind of a cold-hearted Nazi officer who cuts his teeth in the killing fields of the Eastern front where gruesome field executions become methodical genocide over time. Au shares his initial disgust in carrying out orders that he considers ineffective, unnecessary, and demoralizing. His initial objections give way to his innate sadism. Littell paints a convincing portrait of the conflicted literature student who studies law to please his mother, enlists under pressure and cedes his humanity willingly. Several narrative elements contribute to this esquisse of the consciousness of knowing malice. Au's descriptions of atrocities convey his quintessential amorality. The narrator is trapped in his egoism and perseveres past his disgust in order to satisfy his fascination with death. The novel proposes multiple motivations for the banal evil that ordinary people perpetrated during WWII. While Au masks his moral corruption behind much pedantry, Littell offers his protagonist little cover. He strives to make Au's sinister logic beguiling because all affectations are transparent. Self-interest spurs Au to action and concomitantly the readet to inaction: the reader is indicted for his/her complicity in reading the confessions of a murderer. This is a defining trait of the modern novel, that is the existential engagement of the audpience in the dramatic concupiscence of life's morality play.