Wilson: A Consideration of the Sources

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"When the internet - and the collective memory of the 21st 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. In David Mamet's baroque, fragmented world, nothing is certain except the certainty of academics. In playing with the ideas of perception, understanding, and accuracy, he dares to doubt them all. When the truth is quicksand, the gag becomes a lifeline of stoic nobility." After the Cola riots, the fire at the ...
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More About This Book

Overview

"When the internet - and the collective memory of the 21st 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. In David Mamet's baroque, fragmented world, nothing is certain except the certainty of academics. In playing with the ideas of perception, understanding, and accuracy, he dares to doubt them all. When the truth is quicksand, the gag becomes a lifeline of stoic nobility." 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? Does the Joke Code still operate? Has anyone seen my copy of Bongazine? Who were the members of the Bootsie club? Does the Toll Hound dance? What was the meaning of the message written in Mrs. Wilson's urine? Can Jane of Trent unlock this paranoia? What were Chet and Donna doing in the boathouse? And just who does Ginger think she is?
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Editorial Reviews

Jonathan Levi
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
From The Critics
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

Kirkus Reviews
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.
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781585671892
  • Publisher: Overlook Press, The
  • Publication date: 10/1/2001
  • Edition description: 1 ED
  • Pages: 336
  • Product dimensions: 5.70 (w) x 8.34 (h) x 1.32 (d)

Meet 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, both available from Penguin.

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