EVERYWHERE AN OINK OINK: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood, by David Mamet
David Mamet’s best plays have impeccable titles: “American Buffalo,” “Glengarry Glen Ross,” “Speed-the-Plow,” “Oleanna.” So does his best nonfiction book, “Writing in Restaurants.” Now, late in his career, comes a miscellany called “Everywhere an Oink Oink.” Oh, boy. Here we go.
Sometimes you can judge a book by its title. “The more brainless a book’s intended readership, the more rib-nudgingly cute the title has to be,” James Hamilton-Paterson wrote in “Cooking With Fernet Branca,” his terrific comic novel from 2004. Mamet’s new one isn’t brainless. It’s just random, his mind on shuffle. It’s under-argued, rabid in its anti-wokeness and haphazardly written. Mamet’s idea of a transition nowadays is to write, “Anywaythzz (as Daffy said).” Reading this is not unlike sitting next to your Fox News-watching Uncle Alvin at Thanksgiving.
There is a difference, however, between Mamet and the typical post-Trump conservative commentator. (Mamet, who now writes for the National Review, has called himself “a reformed liberal.”) The difference is that Mamet has a hinterland. He’s written important plays and screenplays; he’s got a well-stocked mind; he has a self-deprecating sense of humor. I was willing to put up with his loose elbows, his belching, his dandruff and the way he repeats himself because he’s interesting and funny, at least a portion of the time.
You may not be able to put up with him. If drive-by remarks about “Diversity Capos” and “Covid annoyers,” cracks about liberal policies on immigration and the homeless, and a declaration that we know a movie villain now “by his white skin” will sink this one for you, so be it. Mamet has largely thrown away his career over this stuff, he acknowledges, “sidelined because of my politics (respect for the Constitution, etc.).”
