SOURCE: Wieseltier, Leon. “Machoball Soup.” New Republic 212, no. 17 (24 April 1995): 46.

In the following review, Wieseltier compares Mamet's short novel Passover with his film Homicide.

As a boy, I was pretty good with a knife. I carved wood, I cut line, I cleaned fish, I hurled my finely weighted, mother-of-pearl-handled pocketknife with cool accuracy, blade-first, usually in competition with the other nice Jewish boys who summered in the same hills and woods, and once with deadly accuracy, right between the eyes of a copperhead snake that threatened a friend who was trapped on a rock in a brackish corner of Swan Lake. I was a local hero after that exploit, but only until the sun started to set, when I put my tiny weapon tenderly away, since it was forbidden to me on the Sabbath. In the city, of course, I enjoyed no expression of my Jim Bowie fantasies. In...