The making of Mamet's America is founded upon a verbal busyness, glib, deft, quick; the parenthetical asides that lace his dialogue (destined, undoubtedly, to become as celebrated as Pinter's pauses) suggest minds that abhor verbal vacuums, that operate, at all levels, on the energy of language itself…. Because so much of the activity of his characters is prescribed by their speech, it is often fruitless to analyze their "psychology": like the victors of Dos Passos' U.S.A., like Jay Gatsby, like the unenlightened of a Hemingway novel, they behave as their language directs them to behave, with unquestioning faith in its values. (pp. 2-3)

The similarities are striking … between Mamet and the early Pinter. Both are what we might call magic realists. Both are drawn to situations of uneasy, sometimes claustrophobic intimacy between two or three characters, among whom there is an unacknowledged sparring for power. In...