[In the following review, Wendling comments favorably on The Village.]

One impulse of our postmodern culture has been to place the grandest triumphs of spirit on a level with the banalities of everyday life (for instance, a Michelangelo T-shirt). The effect is to defy modernist urges to glorify the past or to give art an ideality and separateness that somehow debases the lives we live now. This first novel by dramatist and screenwriter David Mamet, already a Pulitzer Prize-winner for Glengarry Glen Ross, avoids such simple iconoclasm.

Far from diminishing achievements of spirit, past or present, The Village instead elevates the most humdrum activities, such as fishing or “fixing” a clock only thought to be broken, into emblems of some timeless resilience in the human spirit. As readers, we feel affection for Mamet's characters because, defeated and lost as they all are, they exist along a human continuum of defeat and loss. We would like these people less if their ills were merely peculiar to them or lent themselves to professionally standardized cures. But the dissatisfactions of these villagers belong to their very existence in this world, and it is this metaphysical incompleteness that binds them (and us with them) into a community that can be called, without sentimentality, human.

Unlike Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Mamet's novel does not leave us vividly remembering the eccentricities of its characters, or the houses and stores in their town, nor is there any one character who provides a unifying perspective of what happens. Mamet desolidifies character and setting, along with plot in the usual sense, so as to carry his readers more fully into the interior landscapes of his multiple protagonists. Their external situations are various: Henry and his wife move about their house selfconsciously unsuccessful in their efforts to deepen their contact with each other; Dick tries to stave off both the bank's foreclosing on his store and the guilt he feels because his wife does not blame him; Maris acts out with men generally because of the rage she feels at the man living with her mother; meanwhile Rose and Mrs. Bell gossip about it all at the post office.

Mamet presents each of these mini-plots in snippets of narrative that sometimes leave us straining to sort out who is talking about whom. But this effort of reading almost parallels the heartbreakingly brave strivings of the characters themselves to see something luminous through their observed experience of life. Henry, for example, noticing one night the light blue and brownish black stripes the moon makes on his lawn, thinks to himself: “Well, if that ain't magic … then I don't know what is.”

The Village is strikingly contemporary in the issues it raises as well as its style. Everywhere, lives are threatened by job loss, divorce, uncaring sex, physical and psychological abuse, the death of children. The villagers find it hard to feel the wisdom in the local clergyman's advice to find the potential for rebirth in the pain of all these losses. Nor are they much helped by their acute self-consciousness, as when Dick, applying a squeegee to a car window after giving a customer gas, carefully studies his effect on the girl in the front seat as she studies her effect on him, while the customer reflects on his relationship to them both.

Some characters do find solace, however, when wholly absorbed in satisfying activity or ritual. Henry finds a perfect moment just before the beginning of a country auction as, sitting with coffee and a doughnut, book and cigarettes at the ready, he is simply overwhelmed with a sense of belonging to that beautiful time and place. In one sense, the moment seems a twentieth-century equivalent of Emerson's sense of divine immanence in the quiet of a church before, rather than during, the service. But this epiphany is also amusing in that it soon needs to be supplemented by a paperback novel.

Mamet gives depth to his short novel by making its present resonate with the past, associating his characters' movements with those of prehistoric animals and figures from Greek, medieval and American history. Occasionally, his writing acquires truly extraordinary narrative power, as in a deerhunting episode late in the novel when, despite losing his compass in the snow, the hunter finds his way back home with seemingly miraculous determination. This return appears an apt metaphor for Mamet's underlying hopefulness about human existence despite its destructive potential.