The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources by David Mamet
Joseph Dewey

David Mamet. Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources. Overlook, 2001. 336 pp. $26.95.

Born-again Christians, earnest lawyers (and the subphylum politicians), diligent academics: late-century postmodern sensibility finds irresistibly comic the antics of each, not merely their audacious search for order (that is the sorry century’s most profound dilemma) but rather their smug certainty that they can conjure it. Prayers, affidavits, and footnotes create an order reliable to them but inevitably ironic (and chillingly comic) to the rest of us. Skewing a familiar speculative fiction premise (a distant future assembling history through the fragmentary records of an lost era), Mamet targets with luscious savvy and deadpan irony the limitless pretense of academics, hungry for tenure, to suture history from such bits, to talk their way into reasonable order. Centuries down the road, the Internet has apparently crashed (sparked, apparently, from massive riots after the truth that Coke and Pepsi are the same formula) and what is left is the hard drive of a Mrs. Wilson, most likely a future President or perhaps the wife of Woodrow. Mamet understands that the laughable premise of the Internet—that the world is now within range of cataloguing—has led us back to the earnest silliness of brain-heavy humanity since the Greeks: the illusion that order is finally possible. We get chapters of academic investigations into comic books, tattoos, jokes, commercial jingles; we get footnotes within footnotes; we get allusions elegantly interwoven within text, signals of an overarching designer (Mamet himself) having the time of his life. All of this is set in the pitchperfect turgidity (under Mamet’s sensibility it is hilarious) that apes academic discourse. Without the distraction of plot, we get enticing fragments that pretend to mimic narrative, and we see beneath the infinite jesting of such high-tech lexical gamesplaying the disturbing notion that sense and nonsense, certainty and uncertainty are (and always have been) synonyms, not antonyms. [Joseph Dewey]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources by David Mamet Joseph Dewey David Mamet. Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources. Overlook, 2001. 336 pp. $26.95. Born-again Christians, earnest lawyers (and the subphylum politicians), diligent academics: late-century postmodern sensibility finds irresistibly comic the antics of each, not merely their audacious search for order (that is the sorry century’s most profound dilemma) but rather their smug certainty that they can conjure it. Prayers, affidavits, and footnotes create an order reliable to them but inevitably ironic (and chillingly comic) to the rest of us. Skewing a familiar speculative fiction premise (a distant future assembling history through the fragmentary records of an lost era), Mamet targets with luscious savvy and deadpan irony the limitless pretense of academics, hungry for tenure, to suture history from such bits, to talk their way into reasonable order. Centuries down the road, the Internet has apparently crashed (sparked, apparently, from massive riots after the truth that Coke and Pepsi are the same formula) and what is left is the hard drive of a Mrs. Wilson, most likely a future President or perhaps the wife of Woodrow. Mamet understands that the laughable premise of the Internet—that the world is now within range of cataloguing—has led us back to the earnest silliness of brain-heavy humanity since the Greeks: the illusion that order is finally possible. We get chapters of academic investigations into comic books, tattoos, jokes, commercial jingles; we get footnotes within footnotes; we get allusions elegantly interwoven within text, signals of an overarching designer (Mamet himself) having the time of his life. All of this is set in the pitchperfect turgidity (under Mamet’s sensibility it is hilarious) that apes academic discourse. Without the distraction of plot, we get enticing fragments that pretend to mimic narrative, and we see beneath the infinite jesting of such high-tech lexical gamesplaying the disturbing notion that sense and nonsense, certainty and uncertainty are (and always have been) synonyms, not antonyms. [Joseph Dewey]

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