Customer Reviews

The Village: A Novel

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Lifeless and purposefully opaque. So much distance is put between the characters and their empty lives and the reader that ultimately there is no emotional connection with the reader. I admire David Mamet so much as a playwright and movie director that I slogged through 121 pages before I gave up completely. I'm bugged by critics who admire crap like this. Just because it was written by a genius doesn't mean the book is genius. It's a failure on a genius scale.

The Village by David Mamet is a disjointed compendeum of slice of life scenarios. In it the inner lives of a number of taciturn, stoic New Englanders are revealed through detailed introspection and minimalist dialogue. The characters themselves are presented as ghost-like beings, full of inwardly directed thought but with little else to flesh out their personas. This book is unsatisfying and pretentious. Not recommended.

This is the first novel by Mamet, one of America's best playwrights, and a good screenwriter. It has a lot in common with Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, which is one of my favorite books. The Village delivers a slice of life in a quiet, anonymous village somewhere in the eastern U.S. The chapters jump around from person to person, playing out how their lives intertwine. Mamet's writing is fascinating. His dialogue is masterful, giving the reader just enough to get the gist of what someone says. Likewise, his narration is distant, noticeably so in many parts. He often goes through most of a chapter referring to a person as "The Man" or "The Soldier," giving the novel an everyman quality, but also driving home the theme of the book: that even a small town, where everyone knows everyone else by name, can be a very lonely place. Overall, I didn't like The Village as much as Winesburg, but it left me with the same calm, melancholy feeling. A good and, from a writing craft standpoint, educational read.

No redeeming features in this book. No prose, no plot, no action, no significance whatsoever. Characters walking around with gigantic chips on their shoulder and inner lives the size of a pea. An utter waste of time.