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Overview
Make-Believe Town brings together David Mamet's acute insights into everyday life, the arts, and politics. These pieces evidence Mamet's love of language, particularly the introductory essay, "Eight Kings", which celebrates the private languages of carpenters, carnival workers, and all crafts and trades, and "The Northern Novel", which propounds Mamet's affection for the line of American fiction exemplified by Willa Cather and Theodore Dreiser. Some of the essays are prose portraits from Mamet's life: "Deer Hunting" and "The Diner" delineate worlds far from the public eye. Make-Believe Town also contains beautifully written recollections of Mamet's early days as a writer ("Girl Copy"), his start in the theater ("Memories of Off Broadway"), his education as a gambler ("Gems From a Gambler's Bookshelf"), and bygone days on Broadway ("Delsomma's"). Mamet's incisive thoughts about public issues - support for the arts, nudity in films, the roles given Jewish characters, even the posthumous rehabilitation of Richard Nixon - round out a far-reaching collection.
Synopsis
Make-Believe Town brings together David Mamet's acute insights into everyday life, the arts, and politics. These pieces evidence Mamet's love of language, particularly the introductory essay, "Eight Kings", which celebrates the private languages of carpenters, carnival workers, and all crafts and trades, and "The Northern Novel", which propounds Mamet's affection for the line of American fiction exemplified by Willa Cather and Theodore Dreiser. Some of the essays are prose portraits from Mamet's life: "Deer Hunting" and "The Diner" delineate worlds far from the public eye. Make-Believe Town also contains beautifully written recollections of Mamet's early days as a writer ("Girl Copy"), his start in the theater ("Memories of Off Broadway"), his education as a gambler ("Gems From a Gambler's Bookshelf"), and bygone days on Broadway ("Delsomma's"). Mamet's incisive thoughts about public issues - support for the arts, nudity in films, the roles given Jewish characters, even the posthumous rehabilitation of Richard Nixon - round out a far-reaching collection.
Publishers Weekly
The 24 brief essays, several published previously, in this collection share no overarching theme, but the playwright's fans can find evidence of his interests and obsessions. His purist love for drama is evinced in an homage to director Greg Mosher, a memoir of his youth immersed in off Broadway and his scorn for the decline of screenwriting into the predictable. Mamet displays his strong Jewish identity when lamenting the "psychic assimilation" that Jewish audiences and actors undergo and urging self-defense, rather than reason, in response to contemporary anti-Semitism. Playing poker has taught this old gambler lessons ("Trust everyone, but cut the cards"), but so has New Hampshire deer hunting. His take on the sexes veers between a wry memoir of writing captions for pornography and a gnomic meditation on sex and partnership. Most of these pieces evaporate rather quickly and a few sound self-important, but Mamet's writing remains spare and lucid. (June)
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
The 24 brief essays, several published previously, in this collection share no overarching theme, but the playwright's fans can find evidence of his interests and obsessions. His purist love for drama is evinced in an homage to director Greg Mosher, a memoir of his youth immersed in off Broadway and his scorn for the decline of screenwriting into the predictable. Mamet displays his strong Jewish identity when lamenting the "psychic assimilation" that Jewish audiences and actors undergo and urging self-defense, rather than reason, in response to contemporary anti-Semitism. Playing poker has taught this old gambler lessons ("Trust everyone, but cut the cards"), but so has New Hampshire deer hunting. His take on the sexes veers between a wry memoir of writing captions for pornography and a gnomic meditation on sex and partnership. Most of these pieces evaporate rather quickly and a few sound self-important, but Mamet's writing remains spare and lucid. (June)Library Journal
Mamet, the playwright of such popular works as Glengarry Glen Ross and the screenplay The Untouchables, is known for his accurate use of ordinary language. His current title is a miscellaneous collection of short essays dealing with a variety of topics from his gambling experiences to his impressions of London, from his view of screenwriting to his opinion of the media's treatment of Nixon's death. In "Demagoguery," he decries the claim of television and computers (with their much-touted "information highway") that we will possess all information and "become God" by sitting down in front of them. Other essays deal with friends of Mamet, child abuse in his family, anti-Semitism, and his early jobs. Although they contain many vivid scenes, biographical details, and sharp observations of contemporary America, as a whole these essays seem like first drafts, somewhat less polished than his previous collection, The Cabin (Random, 1992) and filled with what one critic has called his "chatty non-sequiturs." Still, this work may be of interest to academic and public libraries, particularly those that collect in the area of American theater.Nancy P. Shires, East Carolina Univ., GreenvilleKirkus Reviews
The playwright's latest collection of short, loosely written essays (after The Cabin, 1992) puts his trademark one-upmanship and Chicago machismo on theatrical/literary criticism, reminiscences, and social commentary.Both Mamet's subjects and attitudes will be familiar. Once again, with varying degrees of deliberation, he puts his stamp on stage and screen, men and women, gambling and competition, diners and restaurants, Jewishness and the American cultural mind. His reminiscences are pleasantly sentimental and nostalgic, especially on his theatrical apprenticeship, toiling away at captions for a girlie magazine, and his bygone favorite eatery. His masculine disposition is well represented: "The Diner" defines the art of hanging out (and writing) in places called the Idle-Hour and Coffee-Corner, and the Hemingwayesque "Deer Hunting" articulates Mamet's own sportsman's experience. For all the other essays' easygoing style, his social criticism by comparison smarts with intractable harshness, Juvenalian vigor, and not a little chutzpah. After castigating Hollywood screenwriting and showbiz nudity, Mamet condemns the same cheap desire for entertainment hidden in Nixon's funeral, the Oklahoma bombing, and Washington's Holocaust Memorial. Like his plays' dialogues, Mamet's essays argue purposively and energetically from an exaggerated viewpoint in a kind of preemptive challenge to his readers' responses. In general, although there are stand-outs among these pieces (which have been published in venues as varied as Playboy, the New York Times Magazine, and the Land's End mail-order catalog), none are quite as good as those in Some Freaks or Writing in Restaurants.
Characteristically provocative, amusing, and messy, Mamet's latest collection of essays deliver wit, insight, and truculence in small, mixed doses.