David Mamet is a comic superstar underneath all that academic mumbo-jumbo. In "Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources," he manages to parody the entire world as we know it.
Mamet is a playwright ("Glengarry Glen Ross," "American Buffalo"), director ("State and Main"), screenwriter ("Wag the Dog"), poet, essayist and novelist; in short, he's a pretty big figure in contemporary American literary and dramatic culture. He's adored most for his plays, several of which (he's written more than 20) are award-winning.
"Wilson" is Mamet's third novel. Neither of his first two received much acclaim, and everyone hoped he would stick to his plays from then on. But with "Wilson," Mamet tries something new.
Mamet's latest should not be limited to status as a novel. It is half satirical academic essay; the other half is a mixture of futuristic non-fiction, sermons, jokes, songs and commentary.
It's sometime in the future - the year 2033 or thereabouts. The crash of the Internet in 2021 caused the loss of virtually all knowledge. As a result, the history of the human race has been deleted. The only source for the reassembly of the past is the downloaded memory of Ginger, wife of ex-President Wilson. "Wilson" is the collected transcripts of Ginger's mind.
Mamet has carefully constructed a bizarre, intriguing world from so many fragments of his own creation. The book is composed of brief excerpts of many lost sources and academic papers delving into the past. From issues of Bongazine (a 21st century magazine) to an explanation of the song "Bingo" (in which the name-o refers to the farmer, not the dog), Mamet stays three or four steps above triteness and predictability.
"Wilson" takes the world and turns it inside out, as our future descendants try to determine what all the idiosyncracies of our time period meant. For instance, they suggest that "any event may be reduced to thirds and understood according to the formula, Crack, Snapple, Pop." Who knew Rice Krispies could define life as such?
And then there's the Decade of the Riots. This refers to the Cola Riots that surged after the infamous Revelation, which took place after the Internet Crash of 2021: "Neither the secret of Kennedy's suicide, nor the revelation of Wilson's sex, had the impact of the discovery that Coke and Pepsi were one." The horror. The outrage.
While Mamet must be given heaps of credit for his conceptual originality, his cleverness and his linguistic touch, he doesn't always make it easy on the reader. And it gets frustrating. Especially when characters like Jane of Trent, Chet and Donna seem so vital to the "story" (whatever that is), and I can't figure out just who exactly they are.
Would I have wanted Mamet to explain it all to me? Well, it might have been nice, but then...I wouldn't get the satisfaction of figuring out all the connections for myself - not that I did, but I made it two-thirds of the way there, and that's not bad, eh? Besides, explanatory commentary has no place in a work like this. Each fragment of the book is written within the world it belongs to, and Mamet doesn't get out of character once.
Yet, does he really have to use so many footnotes and neverending grammatical turns? The nonsensical footnotes are overdone and annoying, and the surplus of conjunctions quickly becomes obnoxious. Several of the narrators' voices are reminiscent of Laurence Sterne's well-known character, Tristram Shandy - they're flowery, academic and rife with manifold digressions. Mamet tends to be too erudite for his own good. He likes to show off.
But he certainly had fun writing "Wilson," and one has fun reading it. It's a book full of gags, largely based on linguistic confusion (several pages are devoted to the song, "Get Dressed, You Married Gentleman") and idolization of societal aspects usually never given a second thought (see the aforementioned "Crack, Snapple, Pop" mention).
Throughout all the puns and parodies, Mamet is able to maintain profundity, even if it's hidden under clever wordplay. The point of "Wilson" is that the past is altered even as we speak of it. In one section, entitled "Lost," Mamet relates the Heisenberg principle of uncertainty to attempts at analyzing the past. He goes on to state in whatever narrative mask he's wearing: "This notion that the 'past' as something which took place is wrong. It did not 'take place.' It is taking place now.'"
That in itself is a pretty compelling reason to pick up "Wilson" and take a peek. Mamet offers an idea (exaggerated and parodied, but conceivable, no less) of how a future civilization might view its predecessors. If you dive through all the erudition and manage to make it back up to the surface, you will have obtained an interesting and thought-provoking point of view - and some good exercise as well.
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