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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Twisted meta-history, December 28, 2004
This review is from: Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources (Paperback)
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."
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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Is This A Book or Is It A Con?, January 8, 2002
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.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
HATS OFF GENTLEMEN!* DAVID MAMET IS A GENIUS!, January 25, 2006
The case can be made for this amazing(1) book with three little words: Huzzah for WILSON! Imagine you have been commissioned by the Misanthropological Society of Mars in the year 2006(2) to dissertate about life on the bugbog(3) planet, but find that all life and vestige of civilization have been wiped out by something or another, and that all that remains are some pages of an annoying book called "Misanthropology" (op. cit.). Get the idea? WILSON is not about that at all, but it is an amazingly amusing book; witty, philosophical, likened unto Nabokov's "Pale Fire" (q.v.) because of the footnotes, or unto Mendoza's "Sin Noticias de Gurb" (q.v.) which has no footnotes, but is in Spanish.(4)
(1) Or amusing, as the case may be.(a)
(2) A Martian day is 40 minutes longer than an earth day, and we can presume(b) that earth and Mars have a common 1 A.D. origin. With this info, can you calculate the length of a Martian year?(c)
(3) The planet earth is so described in "Misanthropology: A Florilegium of Bahumbuggery" (q.v.), wherein is posed an unnerving riddle-me-ree, to wit: What do you get if you cross a buzzbug with a diet colt?(d)
(4) Ja ja
(a) Or maybe not
(b) An unwarranted presumption? Who cares? (Dr. Livingstone, I presume)
(c) Based on the information given: no way, Jose[1]
(d) Answer: Buzz Liteyear, or a bugling. (Don't get it? Derive the middle term)[2]
[1] Ha ha. To research Martian years, try Google.
[2] Don't read further unless you give up on the middle term, which follows: A diet colt is a lite yearling. (N'est-ce pas? Now go back and get it.)
* In some versions, AND GENTLELADIES! (too wordy). Trout suggests GENTLEPEOPLE! (doesn't resonate). I say, let it STET.
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