[In the following review, Tandon asserts that The Old Religion is a departure for Mamet and comments on the novel's focus on meditative introspection, whereas he believes many other of Mamet's works rely heavily on external action and dialogue.]

In David Mamet's 1991 film Homicide, Bobby Gold (played by Joe Mantegna, a Mamet regular), an assimilated Jewish detective, visits a Jewish library to seek the meaning of what may be a murder clue: the word “GROFAZ” scrawled on a scrap of paper. And as he waits, he encounters another seeker after clues in words, a Hebrew scholar fascinated by the acrostic possibilities in the Book of Esther, a document which Gold cannot read. “You say you're a Jew,” says the scholar, “but you can't read Hebrew. What are you then?” It is a pivotal moment in the film, but an odd one nevertheless. Not because it jars with the work's varied concerns with identity and betrayal, but because it seems in retrospect to be coming from a different level of sincerity than the other dilemmas in Homicide. Amid the elaborate layers of double-crossing for which Mamet is justly celebrated, this guilty little epiphany of Gold's plays it straight. Seven years later, The Old Religion, Mamet's resolutely strange, fact-based novella, picks up some of Homicide's worries, and, similarly, plays it straight. However, as in his flawed but compelling first novel, The Village, Mamet often sounds here as if he is holding something back. And one reason for this can be traced in his recurring device of the scam, which underpins works as diverse as American Buffalo and House of Games; Mamet is a dramatist of great integrity, but his is a peculiar integrity, for at its heart lies a talent for being, in the most productive sense of the phrase, a confidence man.

“You and I,” said Mamet in 1988, “that is to say, the audience, will accept anything we are not given a reason to disbelieve.” Likewise, the logic of selection and implication plays a major part in many of the artistic practices to which he is drawn, both as a playwright and a critic, such as montage and sleight of hand. In this light, perhaps the most significant influence on his technique (and one which he discusses at length in On Directing Film) is Alfred Hitchcock's notion of the “MacGuffin,” as memorably expounded to François Truffaut:

Well, it's the device, the gimmick, if you will, or the papers the spies are after … the “MacGuffin” is the term we use to cover all that sort of thing: to steal plans or documents, or discover a secret, it doesn't matter what it is. And the logicians are wrong in trying to figure out the truth of a MacGuffin, since it's beside the point. The only thing that really matters is that in the picture the plans, documents, or secrets must seem to be of vital importance to the characters. To me, the narrator, they're of no importance whatsoever.

It is easy to see why Mamet should have such an affinity for the MacGuffin. The situations from which his plays derive could hardly sustain spies and secret plans with ease. Nevertheless, many of them make great use of the opportunities afforded by objects or actions which appear to offer the “key”; but turn out, to all intents and purposes, to be red herrings: the coin in American Buffalo, the real-estate “leads” in Glengarry Glen Ross, the macho wager in Speed-the-Plow. One might think that Mamet is simply being wilful at such moments; after all, his critical writings, for all their salutary candour, cannot always avoid the charge of being contrary for the sake of it (his preference for Theodore Dreiser, of all people, over Charles Dickens, springs to mind). But Mamet's disappointing of the audience's expectations of what the work is going to be “about” has motives that run deeper than artistic caprice. Fond as we may be of all activities which are both rhythmical and obscene, his famous dialogue may be less central to his writing than his MacGuffins; which is why Christopher McQuarrie's excellent screenplay for The Usual Suspects feels closer to the spirit of Mamet than the more obviously derivative Quentin Tarantino.

One of the great strengths of much of Mamet's work is its resistance to any easily “thematic” readings; he is suspicious, both in the texture of his work and in his comments on it, of the idea that works of art are neutral display cases for thematic abstractions, issues or questions which could be settled just as easily outside the works themselves. And in discussing such areas of poetic responsibility, he has, once again, consistently confounded expectations. In “A National Dream-Life,” he argued thus:

As in our dreams, the law of psychic economy operates. In dreams we do not seek answers which our conscious (rational) mind is capable of supplying, we seek answers to those questions which the conscious mind is incompetent to deal with. So with the drama, if the question is one which can be answered rationally, e.g.: how does one fix a car, should white people be nice to black people, are the physically handicapped entitled to our respect, our enjoyment of the drama is incomplete—we feel diverted but not fulfilled. Only if the question posed is one whose complexity and depth renders it unsusceptible to rational examination does the dramatic treatment seem to us appropriate, and the dramatic solution become enlightening.

In addition, his more recent attack on modern art has maintained the line of argument. “That a play is on an Important Topic,” it claims, “does not mean that it is a good play. The play is not meant to ‘help.’ The artist is no more equipped to ‘help’ than the deluded Ivy League graduate.” It is not that Mamet considers these rational and political questions to be irrelevant; although he chimes with Henry James's contrasts between the size and depth of ideas, he could scarcely be accused of aestheticism. Rather, he recognizes that it is possible to act from the best intentions, in a way that runs against the grain of those intentions—a lesson lost on people such as Oliver Stone. Mamet's work does not lend itself readily to that impoverished model of literary value, all too common from the 1980s onwards, whereby stories are good in proportion to the extent to which one identifies directly with the characters, and which has spawned whole genres of parochial self-regard in modern fiction. At his best, Mamet can persuade us to care about the fate of his characters, without our needing to seek the echo of our own voices, or the lineaments of our own faces.

Only a writer with Mamet's talent (and nerve) could make dramatic success from such a blend of Hitchcock and cod-Freudian dream theories; but then his achievement is so often inseparable from his bullishness or sheer bloody-mindedness. When Jeremy Isaacs asked him recently whether his plays had “subtexts,” Mamet paused briefly, looking, perhaps, for a hidden joke in the question before replying, “Well, I hope so.” And while this may have sounded smug or infuriating, the dramatic counterpart to such evasiveness is what often gives his plays their force; consider how hard it is to paraphrase a Mamet play, or, for that matter, what exactly Aaronow and Moss are on about as they conspire in Glengarry Glen Ross:

AARONOW:
Yes, I mean are you actually talking about this, or are we just. …
MOSS:
No, we're just. …
AARONOW:
We're just “talking” about it.
MOSS:
We're just speaking about it. (Pause.) As an idea.
AARONOW:
As an idea.
MOSS:
Yes.
AARONOW:
We're not actually talking about it.
MOSS:
No.

What Mamet is so good at doing is offering the superficial semblance of an issue—something that borders on being a “theme” to take home and discuss over a drink—only to snatch it from beneath the audience's nose. To see Oleanna, for example, merely as a realist or philosophical piece would be to ignore why it is, in its own way, as uncomfortable for men as it is for women. And Glengarry Glen Ross, despite its real-estate setting, plays explicitly off some of the corniest conventions of detective stories, as hinted by Mamet's authorial note: “This appointment was called a lead—in the same way that a clue in a criminal case is called a lead—i.e. it may lead to the suspect, the suspect in this case being a prospect.” To begin with, we are offered a very obvious “lead,” as Moss's plan to rob the office in Act One is met, at the opening of Act Two, by “The Real Estate Office, Ransacked”; but Mamet even has the audacity to make the real perpetrator commit that one “small, but crucial error” so beloved of Agatha Christie and Columbo:

Williamson: Well, I'm saying this, Shel: Usually I take the contracts to the bank. Last night I didn't. How did you know that? One night a year that I left a contract on my desk. Nobody knew that but you. Now how did you know that?

Which is not to say that picking up on the leads helps us that much; on the contrary, it is the play's movement beyond this obvious hook that gives it its disquieting energy.

The Old Religion is set largely inside the head of Leo Frank, an assimilated Jewish factory owner in Atlanta, who was tried in court, and then lynched by a mob in 1914, for raping and murdering a Gentile employee—a crime he did not commit. Given the gravity of his historical source material, it would have been in extremely bad taste for Mamet to play the kinds of bait-and-switch game that characterize his plays. That said, the claustrophobic density of The Old Religion displays its anger so near the surface as to make it not only uncomfortable reading, but on occasion a genuinely unfriendly experience. As Homicide showed at the beginning of this decade, assimilation, and the varieties of racial self-deprecation that go with it, have been recurring objects of Mamet's criticism in recent years—as seen in his famous dismissal of Schindler's List as an “exploitation film.” Bobby Gold realizes during the course of Homicide that he has spent years being the first through the door at crime scenes in order to ingratiate himself; and it is only the ordeal of the false trial that brings home to Leo Frank the fact that, to the people of Atlanta, it matters less that he is assimilated than that he is a Jew. The best parts of the novel are those edgy moments when Frank and his friends manoeuvre around the truths of their own identity (“He pronounced the word ‘kosher’ gingerly, as if to say, I don't disclaim that I have heard it, but I do not wish to say it freely, as to arrogate it to myself on the mere precedent of blood.”) Mamet objected to Schindler's List, on the grounds that, to him, it simply allowed the audience to feel superior. Whatever else it does, The Old Religion never allows a reader to feel superior, but it does suffer somewhat from the strange reversal in Mamet's fictional technique. Where his drama is all lived through externals, both The Village and The Old Religion rely to a great extent on meditative introspection; and seen in these terms, the new novel doesn't wholly convince a reader that its questions could not be posed in another way. Even Homicide finds room for a sick joke involving Hitler's nickname and a brand of pigeon food; The Old Religion, in comparison, is a work of unimpeachable moral integrity, but one that feels too artistically well-behaved for Mamet's peculiar genius to exercise itself fully. That a novel is on an Important Topic does not mean that it is a great novel.