[In the following review, Fleming summarizes the stylistic elements of Wilson.]

The most arresting thing about David Mamet's new novel [Wilson] is its dust jacket. The front cover (reproduced here) displays the trompe l'oeil effect, complete with coffee stains, of a pile of comics—all without year-dates, but each in the unlocatably “dated” style of comic art. The magazine on top, Bongazine, shows its price (“Still only 4c. Slightly higher on Mars”) and features, against a background of spinning planets and imploding stars, an egg-headed intellectual and a dog wearing the Faber and Faber logo as an identity disc. Another comic contains “Free … at no extra cost … 2 Pairs of Magic Specs.” Signalling the novel's concern with intellectual property and intellectual detritus, with naive and cynical misperception, and with a commodity fetishism so advanced as to render impossible the true apprehension of a single thing or service, the front cover represents Mamet's novel as Mamet himself would have it.

The back cover continues and complicates the gag. Here, along with the book's ISBN and bar code (and the appearance, once again, of Faber's “ff”), is the novel's self-description, in three paragraphs. The first (“After the Cola Riots, the fire at the Stop ‘n’ Shop, and the death of my kitten, what remains? Can any sense be made of the texts found in the capsule or stuffed in the airlock? … What were Chet and Donna doing in the boathouse? And just who does Ginger think she is?”) gives a foretaste of what is to follow. The second explains the purpose of the “intellectually breathtaking tour” that the novel conducts through a world where “nothing is certain except the certainty of academics.” Of course, this description is itself a joke: “in playing with the ideas of perception, understanding, accuracy [Mamet] dares to doubt them all. When truth is a quicksand, the gag becomes a lifeline of stoic nobility. Derrida meets Beachcomber and comes away smiling.” For readers still in the dark, the blurb then concludes with a paragraph of self-assessment as comically misguided as anything in the novel itself: “a literary jeu d'esprit, a modern day Tristram Shandy, a hilarious satire on false scholarship, Wilson is David Mamet at his best and most mischievous.”

But the dust jacket repays still further study. For its inside contains the price of the book, a studiously casual and now famous photograph of the author (copyrighted to his wife, Rebecca Pigeon) and a sparse section of “acclaim for David Mamet's novels” (which are, in fact, two, and unremarkable). And here some readers may begin to wonder if the people from Pentagram, who did the cover design, have not extended Mamet's meditation on self-deceit and the excesses of market-driven publishing a little too far—whether, that is, in revealing the cultural contradictions against which the book rails to be the conditions of its own existence, they have not summed up the book in such a way as to render further reading of it unnecessary.

Those who do proceed will not go unrewarded. Mamet (essayist, poet and author, since 1970, of approximately fifty stage, screen and television plays, as well as two books about acting and one on directing film) is a writer who loves to assemble nonsense into metrically compulsive forms. His reputation as one of the best dramatists writing in English arises in part from his ability to produce word music from semantically impoverished speech. His dramatic characters typically seek this effect as a mode of local pleasure and empowerment, but it finally belongs less to themselves than to a designed action within which each speech is a formal dramatic gesture. Mamet's way with words is in some evidence in Wilson: as in this fragment from Ginger's diary (its grace enhanced by its capacity to invoke the doggerel verse of Theodor Giesel): “I shall not wear the blue. I shall not wear the beige I shall not wear the kerseymere—I shall not wear the taupe nor the mauve. I shall not wear the lawn. I shall not wear the lavender.”

Since Mamet is a prolific writer of Hollywood screenplays, there are today more people who know his work than know that they know it. Mamet's ability to wring pathos out of the quotidian will be familiar to such readers (“How much more preferable to've gone without the milk” says one character, remembering “that time we moved and the milkman moved with us”); as will a thematic logic whereby meaning appears only and exactly in the place where it is not sought. So Donna, dying of gunshot wounds, realizes both that death was “precisely as pictured in those works she'd always judged empty … of talent and imagination,” and that the important events of her life had been those “which, at the time, had seemed crucial, essential, formative, life-changing, and which she'd discarded or repressed.” In Mamet's plays and screenplays, this inability to achieve a consequential focus on events may be locally comic, but it tends towards tragedy, and is modulated by a formal beauty that makes Mamet's characters worth listening to, regardless of what they are saying. In Wilson, Mamet is exerting less control over the action, and the failure of his characters to make sense of their existence (“for how much of our lives, if we think about it, comes down to just gossip? Most? All? Surely more than ‘some’”) easily becomes wearing.

Wilson is enlivened by some very good jokes, which range from the tiny (“O Tempura. O Morays”) to sustained disquisitions on “The Parking Meter Problem,” on when to replace a piece of soap, and on Abraham Lincoln's five-mile walk to school each day (“a prescience on his part, for why would he have troubled, absent his (quite correct) valuation of its worth in advertising, in light of the fact that the school was across the street?”) But where Mamet's gifts as a writer are largely dependent on his capacity to chart patterns of human engagement within registers other than that of the simply said, in Wilson, he has set himself the task where the fact that none of his characters know what they are talking about serves no larger purpose than the demonstration of his own intellectual proposition that we live in a dangerously impoverished—or, to use one of his own favourite terms, emasculated—culture: “Are we, like sea anemones, born to live … glued to a rock in this undulating sea of shit, this precious, casuistic useless crap, this vomit, this scholastic and obscene perversion of all that is good?” And here we seem to be dealing less with the representation of pretentious or egotistical ignorance, than with the thing itself.

The book's full title is Wilson: A consideration of the sources … containing the original Notes, Errata, Commentary, and the Preface to the Second Edition. This preface (which may or not be by “the editors of Bongazine”) is heavily annotated, with footnotes on footnotes: like the rest of the book, it is designed first to incite, and then block, the search for meaning. Wilson is ostensibly set in the second half of the twenty-first century: Mars has been settled, the Internet has crashed, libraries have been destroyed, and a fire in the “Stop ‘n’ Shop” (one of the few surviving archives of twentieth-century life) has erased what survived of the culture of the past. All that remains is a random assemblage of written fragments, and the will to make sense of them:

The growth of Krautz's canon, beginning with the Cola Riots, can be seen to parallel the settlement on Mars; he has in fact, been identified (under the nomme de guerre of Bennigsen)∗ with Mars, the God of War of the Ancient Geeks. … It was the Great Decampment which began the “Change,” as the last links were severed between our age and the “Written Word.”

(3)

∗Or was Krautz the pseudonym?

Though an impartial survey of the scholastic blether published on “The Loss of the Written Word” might send one to the dictionary to double-check the definition of “oxymoron.”

But who is it who has undertaken to “order these thoughts”? Not Mamet, for whom academic wrong-thinking is both the symptom and the cause of a profound cultural destitution, and whose point here, in any case, is that the will to order produces only chaos. Here, and in the films he directs, Mamet's preferred way of making sense is first to render his medium unreliable—to expose it as a register of desire, delusion and false consciousness—and then to pattern images and events into a sort of agentless dream-work, a Borromean knot of cause and effect: “how is one to parse that which may have been delusion but which was borne out by subsequent events?”

Still, Mamet knows that “the mind fights shy of the unexplained.” Here, readers are invited to imagine that academic A wrote the main text (and is therefore responsible, pedant though he is, for the erroneous identification of Mars as a “Geek” god, and the feminization of nom); while academic B introduced the query about Krautz. But who authored footnote (3)—a footnote that has nothing to do with A's argument, and whose signature effect is hostility to an academic protocol that it refuses to understand, even as it asserts itself as an instance of the same? In its refusal to consider what might be either consequential or fun in systems of abstract thought (or in the attempt to get them right)—as in its insistence that scholarship is simply a bad joke—footnote (3) is characteristic of Wilson's editorial apparatus and the novel as a whole. If Heisenberg's “uncertainty principle” holds it impossible to know both the speed and the location of a sub-atomic particle, “who would want to?” If space is infinite, “all he could think was of the unfortunate, the pathetic impossibility of a man on the largest and a woman on the smallest world having a sexual encounter.” If deconstruction is “based upon a criminal, nay, a psychotic aversion to meaning” … then “deconstruct (reconstruct) the sentence … ‘Eskimo pussy is mighty cold.’”

Beyond the fact that such manifestations of anti-intellectualism function as the register of Mamet's own sexism, ethnocentrism and homophobia, they raise the question of what, other than its own self-importance, this novel is a parody of. If particle physics or deconstruction are made to look ridiculous as they are adumbrated here, what does that demonstrate except that each requires a specialized intellectual effort beyond the brief of an easily affronted common sense? The abrogation of knowledge and efficacious thought staged in this novel is generated by its own attempt to assert a difference “between those who wear cap and gown and human beings”; it is therefore the responsibility not of Heisenberg, or Derrida, but of Mamet himself. Is Wilson then a particularly postmodern satire, one cunningly designed to miss its own point—or is it, taken all in all, a piece of bad writing? Mamet's novel finally functions as a request to readers to have compassion for the anger of an anti-intellectualism that fears it is not being taken seriously. To the extent that it knows that to voice this demand is to ensure that it will not be met, Wilson is not without a heroic pathos of its own.