David Mamet: The Village
Mamet Creates a Dark Atmospheric Work About a New England Village.
Mamet accentuates a stark and lonely existence for his main characters. The village forms the backdrop which contains the separate worlds of its characters.
David Mamet, author, screenwriter, and playwright, wrote his first novel in 1994 entitled The Village. It is a dark and lonely sweep through a sleepy New England town and features his trademark writing style in the form of a novel. His second and third novels, The Old Religion and Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources were written in 1997 and 2000.
The Plot
The novel tells the motivations and thoughts of several of the people in the village - including a hardware store owner, a farmer, a state trooper, the main character Henry and an irresistible young girl named Maris. There are twists and turns to the novel, but not much changes the atmosphere the novel starts out with. Mamet propels the action with precise descriptions of objects: in particular, intricate details about guns are showcased. In one section, it is reported that someone has shot themselves. Other deaths take place, but they all seem distant from the interior workings of the main characters.
Interior Lives
What seems much closer to the characters is their interior thoughts and musings. For instance, there is a very good scene of a trooper out on a lake, fishing. The passage starts: “There was a great comfort in being part of a group; and it was, he thought, similar to the comforts of being alone. If you took the trappings off, he thought, it felt the same; and much of it was just the lack of need for speech.”
This type of interior self disclosure is the type of thing that Mamet can explore in writing a novel as opposed to his more usual dialogue driven material. But his down to earth common sense insights remain: The trooper looks at the thrashing fish he is about to reel in: “It’s like the first time you’re going to get laid,” he thought, “and you cannot believe it, but you know it’s going to be.”
New England Confinement
There are several sections about chopping firewood, using firewood to heat with, and the stacked quantity itself outside during winter. Mamet describes the concerns of one shopkeeper who heats his store, the hard up hardware store owner Dick. Dick worries about what the customers might think - whether too much heat, or the right amount, and whether he was heating the store for the customers benefit or his own. The warmth of the fire seems to suffocate him instead of being a source of comfort.
Style
While The Village broods and smolders for its 238 pages, it is punctuated by tight dialogue and careful description that make Mamet a captivating novelist. The young girl Maris thinks of the people around her: “The lot of you,” she thought. “Ears back like jackasses.”
In addition to the perils of social stagnation, The Village features other trademark Mamet themes such as the terrors of the wilderness. Henry loses his way and goes through two compasses before he gets his bearings by seeing a road. The use of a compass is picked up three years later in his 1997 movie The Edge where a makeshift compass is created in the Alaskan wilderness. In The Village, Henry’s lonely trek is much closer to home.
