The Village: A Novel - Softcover

Mamet, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0316543381 ISBN 13: 9780316543385

Publisher: Little Brown & Co, 1996

Synopsis

The noted playwright offers a novel about life in a secluded, mysterious, and complex New England town

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

A disappointing first novel from the Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright. Mamet traverses ground familiar to those who read his collection of autobiographical essays (The Cabin, 1992), which often celebrates a sense of place. Here the locale is a New England village near the French-Canadian border. Again the elements are known--hunting, smoking, beautiful women. Not surprisingly, despite the presence of female characters, the novel has a lean, masculine flavor as it follows the inhabitants of the village through a year in their unexceptional lives. Dickie, owner of the general store (complete with potbellied stove) that is the focal point of commerce, information, and fellowship, constantly doodles the figures of his mortgage payment as he slips slowly into bankruptcy; a woman attracts the attention and lust of married men as well as single ones; one man becomes a local celebrity after he fends off some would-be attackers in the woods; another delights in nothing more than the simple pleasure of sitting in the sun at an auction, his cigarettes in his pocket and his dark glasses on. Old loves are remembered: a mother by her son, a woman by her former boyfriend. Beneath the restrained surface of the town, however, there is brooding anger and violence. A wife is beaten and the police are summoned. Marriages go sour but continue in silence. Through the year, the village itself, following the unchanging rhythms of the seasons, emerges as the only real character of the book. The townspeople are interchangeable cardboard cut-outs, merely set decorations for the location. This is subdued, for Mamet. He seems to want the reader to read it as he hears it on his mind's painstakingly crafted stage. But good, sharp, realistic dialogue can't save what comes across essentially as a banal, masculine, low-key Peyton Place. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

As you would expect, the texture of this first novel by a renowned playwright tricks readers into thinking they're reading a play. It's easy to picture the village in The Village, a quiet New England community with a local grocery, hardware store, bank, and post office in the heart of "downtown." It's also easy to imagine the characters milling about on a stage; there's the middle-aged couple growing wary of one another, the trooper with his hunting gear, the down-and-out hardware store owner, and the young woman who struts along the avenue with every man's eye on her. Mamet daringly strays from traditional fiction-writing style, relying on dialogue rather than description and eschewing conventional plot and character development. As it did in such plays as Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Speed-the-Plow, Mamet's truncated and fractured dialogue-- captures speech patterns in an utterly realistic way. In fact, most of the descriptive parts are actually dialogues the characters are having with themselves. Although this style might prove distracting for casual fiction readers, fans of Mamet's unusual sense of drama will enjoy this darkish, slice-of-life story. Mary Frances Wilkens

About this edition

• Publisher: Little Brown & Co
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0316543381
• ISBN 13: 9780316543385
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 238