SOURCE: Tandon, Bharat. “An Important Topic for a Novel.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4962 (8 May 1998): 22.

In the following review, Tandon asserts that The Old Religion is a departure for Mamet and comments on the novel's focus on meditative introspection, whereas he believes many other of Mamet's works rely heavily on external action and dialogue.

In David Mamet's 1991 film Homicide, Bobby Gold (played by Joe Mantegna, a Mamet regular), an assimilated Jewish detective, visits a Jewish library to seek the meaning of what may be a murder clue: the word “GROFAZ” scrawled on a scrap of paper. And as he waits, he encounters another seeker after clues in words, a Hebrew scholar fascinated by the acrostic possibilities in the Book of Esther, a document which Gold cannot read. “You say you're a Jew,” says the scholar, “but you can't read Hebrew. What are you then?” It is a pivotal moment...