Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources

Rating:
Summary: Twisted meta-history
Review: If you locked Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire" and Mark Z. Danielewski's "House of Leaves" in a dark room together, the resulting love child might resemble David Mamet's "Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources." This quirky, twisted "novel" takes a look at literature, pop culture, and... oh, come on, no one can tell.

Imagine a future where the literary history of the world has been put on the computer, and then the entire Internet has crashed. Culture and history as we know it have vanished. So now only a few fragments remain, and must be pieced back together with painstaking (and sometimes insane) skill. Not to mention a lot of (pitiful) academic bickering.

The result is an intricate study of the Bootsie Club, the haunted stories of Binky Beaumont, the mysterious death of Woodrow Wilson's wife, Lola Montez, soap, the Cola Riots, analyzation of the peculiar diary entries ("Dear Diary, I am surprised that I am surprised anymore"), fragments of novels, and interestingly weird poetry.

It's almost impossible to fully describe "Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources," especially since it is only a novel in the sense that everything in it is fictional. Don't expect a linear storyline, or a story in one chunk. That's too normal, too ordinary, and too little fun. So Pulitzer-winning playwright/screenwriter/novelist Mamet takes a different route.

It has no beginning. It has no real end. It can be read backwards, forwards, or from the middle outward. It's constantly self-referencing. It's a giant mass of snippets, anecdotes, and analyses. And while at first it seems like a dense, nonsensical mass of fictional bits, eventually the brain adjusts to it.

Mamet spoofs the pompous tone that academics use -- there are studies of nursery rhymes in here! The smallest and most ridiculous bits of literature and history are studied, such as the Joke Code, a philosophical look at humor. In a possible homage to Nabokov, he also peppers the whole thing with footnotes.

Every time the text seems to be getting too serious, Mamet throws in a footnote that proclaims "Why? Because it makes a pretty picture" or proclaiming, "Yah yah yah yah. I'm rubber and you're glue." And don't forget his poetry: "The ponderous burdens of the few/to license, nay, inaugurate the new/peregrinations of the Wandering Jew..."

Postmodernist comedy is at the heart of Mamet's twisted meta-history. "Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources" is hard to get into, but becomes weirdly funny when you "get it."

Rating:
Summary: A real fan of Glengarry Glen Ross
Review: Marvelous. Very twisted, slowly captures you in a world that reminds you of those insidious thoughts that you had trapped in a bad history class...and the plot only comes into view in the corner of your eye, but when you try to focus on it...

Rating:
Summary: Is This A Book or Is It A Con?
Review: The writing of David Mamet can be simple, much like a open jaw- steel bear trap lying exposed, at your feet. Or this open jaw- steel bear trap can really be a ravenous black hole in the center of your literary universe, a hungry black hole waiting to devour you, if you are dumb enough to go spelunking into it's center, the vortex. While reading "Wilson" ask yourself the following questions:
1)Is this a book or is it a con?
2)Is "Wilson" a series of unpublished chapters from previous works by the author?
3)Or, is "Wilson" really a surrealistic landscape onto itself much like "The Interzone" of William S.Burroughs?
Do not read "Wilson" in chronological order!
Very rarely does an author such as David Mamet compose a snub- nose revolver like "Wilson" in which the printed words within begin to tell us everything about the author's style, but always end by telling us almost nothing about the writer's style. Good!
David Mamet has informed and confounded us again.

Rating:
Summary: A miserable experience
Review: This is one of those books where you realize you are not reading it, but moving your eyes consciously across the lines, over the words, absorbing nothing. It's a collection of vignettes apparently linked by the notion of the world's memory being lost and reconstructed (badly, it appears). The grandiloquent style only makes it more difficult to comprehend what, exactly, is being discussed. Since the book offers no narrative, there is nothing to guide one through the clumsy, unrelated mini-chapters.

I admire Mamet's plays and movies, but it's depressing to think trees may have fallen for this mess.