Customer Reviews

The Old Religion: A Novel

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Being very familiar with the Leo Frank case and the various forms of media that have evolved concerning it (novels, plays, movies, musicals...etc.) I was anxious to see what slant Mamet would take on this most intriguing true story. As usual, Mamet offers a bizarre, disturbing and profoundly intellectual work that provides a whole new look at Leo Frank. Instead of focusing in on the trial or events surrounding it...Mamet takes us on a journey inside Frank's head...we see the mind of a man displaced; trying to make peace with himself, his world and his God. The result is not a page-turner, not a heartfelt and moving account of a man accused, but rather a facsinating examination of the human brain and it's inexplicable way of relating ideas. A worthwhile read for anyone familiar with the Frank case...but a little too heavy and vague for those who are not.

Mamet's prose is never easy, but always rewarding. In his second novel, Mamet takes as into the mind of Leo Frank, a New York Jew, wrongly accused of murdering an employee of his. As the reader learns about Leo Frank's background and of his trial and eventual unjust conviction, (s)he also gets a piece of Frank's mind pondering the big philosphical and social questions: What does it mean to be a Jew in America? What does it mean to be an American? What is the role of justice, wealth and hard-work? Yet, he also asks himself questions that are both personal and universal: What if he had not come to work on that day? He wonders whether he shouldn't have foreseen the future, and he asks himself as we often do, whether there were any signs he ignored or misread that could have saved him. In a way, it's a novel about the small and unsovable questions each and everyone of us faces in one's life. And Mamet's depiction of these ponderings are not only brilliant in its clear-ness, but his answers and insights into these questions are also enlighting. As when he says that when one looks back on one's past and doesn't feel pride but sadness. That's wisdom. Or when he discredits the typical Jewish response to anti-smitism, which is a reference to the contribution of the Jews to society, by claiming that contribution in itself is despicable as it means nothing but 'what have you done for me'. This is not a melodrama, although the book ends dramatically. Neither is it Hemingway-esque, as the story's emphasis is not on action or plot, it is rather a beautiful account of a man trying to find sense in a senseless situation, by trying to find the answers to his existence. The questions he asks and the answers he gives are often familair, but have never been put so beautifully and with so much insight.

In The Old Religion, historical figure Leo Frank, a Jewish factory owner in the old American South falsely accused of rape and murder, then imprisoned and eventually lynched by an organised mob, is turned by Mamet into a religious philosopher, an all but obssessive turner over of truths and half truths, propositions and the voices within voices of a disputatious mind from a disputatious people. But the heart of it is still the same: "To be a man," the Rabbi said, was to behave as a man in that situation where there were neither the trappings nor the rewards of manhood: scorned, reviled, abandoned, humiliated, powerless, terrified, mocked. "Now be a man..." the Rabbi said."

And in The Edge, a movie by Mamet, the millionaire played by Anthony Hopkins is an obssessive learner and compiler of facts, a man detached from his emotions, who through the forces of a melodrama plot, (a plane goes down stranding him in the wilderness with his wife's lover, the fashion photographer Alec Baldwin who wants him dead) is forced to confront himself and, stripped to his essentials, survive. In a sense, The Edge is the opposite story to The Old Religion in that the former has as its central motif a canoe paddle on whose two sides a rabbit and a ravenous beast, I cannot quite recall what, co-exist. Why is the rabbit not afraid? "Because he knows he's smarter then the.." Fox, I believe the beast is. It is significant that the line, among the best in the film, is not quite memorable enough to hold the mind. And the central, memorable sequence of the film is millionaire and adulterous rival being forced to collaborate in killing a bear. That bear was more memorable than the characters or the dialogue. In The Old Religion the opposite moral is operative, Frank is in no useable way smarter than his employee Jim, who uses the white Southern mob's unwillingness to believe in the intelligence of a "nigro" to fool them and gets away with murder, dooming the outsider Jew. You cannot be smarter than the fox and disruptive nature, chaos; the forces of darkness cannot be conquered - you must only stand and face them as you may, that is the true heart of Mamet's reveries.

The trouble is that this does not always amount to a compelling fulcrum, in and of itself, it must accompany colour or is bland, a blank stare in the face of onrushing doom - Mamet's stoic glance in the face of the cancer look.

In The Old Religion, Frank's habits of dissecting, homelitically commenting on and generally discoursing throughout and over every event of his downward course lend the book the air of a series of absent minded sermons, underpinned with occasional colourful clues as to motive, projection through space and narrative to fate, the taste of life. As Mamet points out somewhere in his book of actors' sermons "True or False"- intentions are not interesting, a person's qualities are not interesting, only actions are interesting. Hence the only memorable thing about the Rabbi, a key figure of the last third of the book, is the way he lights a match, his way with a cigarette. This is actual character. Mamet doesn't give either Frank or the Rabbi or any of the other characters quite enough internal colour, a personal smell or feeling, to make them anything - an actor could not successfully play them without addition and a reader cannot happily create them in the mind's eye because aside from the endless discourses- as Mamet's Frank asks himself at one point "what part of reason is not simply the recoil of fear?" - there is nothing much going on. The only thing which defines Frank's response in the face of the onrushing catastrophe is his reversion to the "Old Religion" of Judaism away from the "Old Religion" of the South, of America, of the belief in progress. This is not really, in itself, much that you can play. As Mamet the actor would put it: What's the objective? And it cannot really be said that Mamet the novelist has given the actor or reader much in the way of lines on a page to sustain the illusion of character.

At the novel's early parts, before chaos unfolds, one feels a little like the inhabitant of a Aharon Appelfeld novel, where bitter laughter and irony is beneath every casual detail of the lives of comfortable Jews on the lip on an abyss. And Mamet's skill is always wordily present - for probably two thirds of the novel he manages to keep you reading, keep you turning the pages, despite very little meat between his odd moments of concrete detail. This is no small skill. But his aesthetic position about acting is disproved in his own work, in this particular book. Not enough blood in these characters to sustain the book.

Bologna is not in Spain. Czechoslavakia did not exist in 1914 . Leo Frank was real - David Mamet is real - the pretetious ramblings of the imaginary Leo Frank are neither philosophically or theologically enlightening , entertaining or profound . For a fictional treatment of the Frank Case , try Kluger's" Member of the Tribe" . Rabbi Arnold Mark Belzer

I love David Mamet's plays (recently, I laughed my way through the movie adaptation of State and Main), but this novel was disappointing. The event itself (described on the book jacket) is much more interesting than a fragmented interior monlogue by a less-than-fascinating protagonist. The idea invoked The Stranger, but unlike Camus who does a brilliant job, Mamet is much less brilliant. This read more like a literary experiment in a writing workshop than a polished piece by Mamet. If you want to read the master of this genre, stick to Camus.

This book is an exploration of the Leo Frank case who in 1914 in Georgia was falsely convicted of rape/murder and was lynched for the crime; the tale is told through Frank's internal musings. In writing the internal dialogues, and yes they are dia- or trialogues not monologues, Mamet shows his skill as a playwright - playwrights must tell their tale through the speech of the cast.

However, in the early chapters of the book it is sometimes difficult to determine who is speaking. And Frank's social relationships come across as one-dimensional as Mamet focuses on the relationships necessary to explain this miscarriage of justice.

The novel is good enough to recommend to individuals interested in prejudice, miscarriages of justuce etc. - but it doesn't deserve an unqualified recommendation.

David Mamet is certainly an excellent story-teller and an accomplished writer. No one can take that away from him.

But this story - which in Mamet's mind is intended to combat bigotry and racism toward Jews - actually enhances bigotry and racism toward other groups that are being marginalized in current American society.

Mamet gives us a story where an innocent Jewish man is mistakenly convicted of rape and suffers a harrowing fate at the hands of a lynch mob. Mamet tells us that this happened because of anti-Semitism. Fair enough.

Mamet's character then goes on to deliver a two-fisted verbal assualt on Christians of the "evangelical" variety ("they say they've been saved. Saved from what?"), who he portrays as evil, stupid, and lazy. (They bask in "inherited glory," although they've contributed nothing to society, "invented no vaccines," as Mamet puts it.)

First of all, there is no evidence that the historical killers in this case were "evangelical Christians." It's a big stretch to say that just because a murder occurred in the south, that it was committed by Bible-thumping Southern Baptists.

Second, "evangelical Christians" comprise about 7 to 10 percent of the current American population (a number that is consistently revealed in polls by Gallup, Barna, Smith, etc.). That's about the same as the number of Jews and Muslims in America combined. They are consistently villified as "right-wingers" who want to take over the government, impose a theocracy, and kill homosexuals - none of which is true. (The typical evangelical is a moderate Republican of the John McCain variety.) Aside from the rather sympathetic portrayal of Ned Flanders on the Simpsons, the entire media establishment is arrayed against this one segment of our population. The lies and stereotypes directed against these people are as pernicious and hateful as those directed against the Jews in Nazi Germany. (The Jews, too, were out to take over society, according to the Third Reich.) Mamet's hateful scree against people "who say they've been saved" is just fuel for the fire. It takes a feeble-minded coward to throw himself wholeheartedly into society's accepted mode of bigotry, and well, Mamet lives up.

Third, evangelicals are hardly stupid people who bask in "inherited glory" from the Pilgrim days. Evangelical accomplishments are many - from revolutionizing the field of linguistics (Kenneth Pike) and Philosophy (Alvin Plantiga), to improving the lives of millions of Latin Americans after the abysmal failure of Roman Catholicism to confront oppression and injustice, to helping freedom of religion and freedom of speech spread throughout the globe, Evangelicals have contributed much to modern society. Of course, they haven't contributed much to the Entertainment industry, and perhaps that's the only industry Mamet cares about.