Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources

by David Mamet

Overview

A “curiously compelling” novel by the Pulitzer prize–winning playwright in which the internet crashes and the past is reconstructed from memories. (Publishers Weekly)

When the Internet—and the collective memory of the twenty-first century—crashes, the past is reassembled from the downloaded memories of Ginger, wife of ex-President Wilson. The transcripts take the reader on an intellectually breathtaking tour through David Mamet’s baroque, fragmented world, where nothing is certain except the certainty bestowed by the academy.

“As erudite as can be, engagingly mischievous and occasionally a little chilling.” —The Sunday Times

“Enticing . . . Mamet targets with luscious savvy and deadpan irony the limitless pretense of academics.” —Review of Contemporary Fiction

fiction;speculative;novel;satire;pastiche;academic life;scholarship;near-future;experimental;Mars;settlement;colonization;science fiction;internet;dependency;social;political;historical;impact;futurist;modernist;literary;criticism;popular;culture;philosophical;humorous



FIC052000 FICTION / Satire

FIC064000 FICTION / Absurdist

FIC028120 FICTION / Science Fiction / Humorous



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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781468302325
Publisher:	ABRAMS, Inc.
Publication date:	05/23/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	350
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1984. He is also the author of Writing in Restaurants and On Directing Film.

Editorial Reviews

Wilson is a super-academic commentary on the ur-historical text of future historians--the memories of a woman named Ginger who may have been the wife of President Woodrow Wilson or a later President Wilson.
— Los Angeles Times

Jonathan Levi

In the futuristic world of Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources, most historical information has been digitized, then lost. The twentieth century must be reconstructed from bits and pieces of surviving popular culture, including (perhaps) the meanderings of Woodrow Wilson's wife and fragments of (possibly) apocryphal texts. A team of pedantic editors assemble, footnote and interpret these "sources." In this fiction, names abound but characters don't exist. No plot or conceptual continuity fills the lacuna of character. The only setting is the page, and each one is scored by errant scholasticism. Wilson is not original: Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire and, more recently, Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves and Lee Siegel's Love in a Dead Language are better, wittier examples of "scholarly fiction." Wilson does share qualities with two of Mamet's movies—the academic bombast of Oleanna and the viewer-beware secrecy of The Spanish Prisoner—but the novel has not an iota of the humane desperation found in, say, American Buffalo or Glengarry Glen Ross. Midway through Wilson, the book offers possible commentary on itself: "a joke, or error, or act of intellectual savagery."
—Tom LeClair

You'll want to clear your sinuses by renting a video of Glengarry Glen Ross or American Buffalo after wrestling with this unruly anti-novel by the noted playwright and remarkably unremarkable writer of fiction. It's a futurist-modernist text of sorts, whose premise is the loss of virtually all literary and popular culture (when the Internet crashed, in 2021), and "scholarly" attempts to reconstruct it from surviving fragments (faithfully, numbingly reproduced here). If Jacques Barzun had been re-edited by Paulie Shore, you might have something like this book's aggressive profusion of horrendous puns ("Get Dressed, You Married Gentlemen"), analyses of dumb (many ethnic) jokes, imitation poetry, memoirs of would-be celebrities (such as president Woodrow Wilson's spacey "ex-wife'), and (far too few) blank pages. Occasional good gags (e.g., a fragment of Dink Stover at Yale is "believed to be from Aristotle") are infrequent needles in this smothering haystack of a novel. One notes approvingly a footnote reference to a fictitious tome deemed "either a work of overwhelming erudition or a vast pile of shit." Well, folks, we're here to tell you-Wilson isn't even half-vast.

Kirkus Reviews