SOURCE: Wendling, Ronald C. Review of The Village, by David Mamet. America 173, no. 8 (23 September 1995): 26-7.

In the following review, Wendling comments favorably on The Village.

One impulse of our postmodern culture has been to place the grandest triumphs of spirit on a level with the banalities of everyday life (for instance, a Michelangelo T-shirt). The effect is to defy modernist urges to glorify the past or to give art an ideality and separateness that somehow debases the lives we live now. This first novel by dramatist and screenwriter David Mamet, already a Pulitzer Prize-winner for Glengarry Glen Ross, avoids such simple iconoclasm.

Far from diminishing achievements of spirit, past or present, The Village instead elevates the most humdrum activities, such as fishing or “fixing” a clock only thought to be broken, into emblems of some timeless resilience in the human spirit. As readers, we feel affection for Mamet's...