B6 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 8 , 20229 MONDAY | 5 P.M. Laura Thompson discusses
“Heiresses: The Lives of the Million Dollar Babies,”
streamed through Lewes Library at lewes.lib.de.us.
7 P.M. Sarah McCoy discusses “Mustique Island”
with Jane Green, streamed through One More Page
Books at onemorepagebooks.com. $27.99.
10 TUESDAY | 1 P.M. Howard Mortman discusses
“When Rabbis Bless Congress” with Brian Lamb,
steamed through the National Archives at
archives.gov.
6 P.M. Evie Hawtrey presents “And by Fire” at Bards
Alley, 110 Church St. NW, Vienna. 571-459-2653.
6:30 P.M. James Grady discusses “This Train” with
Stephen Hunter at Kramerbooks, 1517 Connecticut
Ave. NW. 202-387-1400.8 P.M. Rachel M. Harper discusses “The Other
Mother,” streamed through Politics and Prose Live at
politics-prose.com/events.
11 WEDNESDAY | 12 P.M. Kerri ní Dochataraigh
discusses “Thin Places” with Katherine May,
streamed through Lost City Books at
lostcitybookstore.com.
6 P.M. David Gergen discusses “Hearts Touched
with Fire: How Great Leaders Are Made,” streamed
through Politics and Prose Live.
7 P.M. Steve Almond discusses “All the Secrets of
the World” with Matthew Klam at Solid State Books,
600 H St. NE. 202-897-4201.
12 THURSDAY | 5 P.M. Dikla Levy Frances
disscusses “Baking Science: Foolproof Formulas toCreate the Best Cakes, Pies, Cookies, Breads and
More,” streamed through Lewes Library.
6 P.M. Jennifer Saint discusses “Elektra” with
Yangsze Choo, streamed through East City
Bookshop at eastcitybookshop.com.
7 P.M. Claudia Gray discusses “The Murder of Mr.
Wickham” with Amanda Quain, streamed through
One More Page Books.
14 SATURDAY | 7 P.M. Diccon Bewes discusses
“Cartographica Helvetica” at Lost City Books, 2467
18th St. NW. 202-232-4774.
For more literary events, go to wapo.st/literarycalLITERARY CALENDARMay 9 - 14Book WorldWashington Post Paperback Bestsellers
COURTESY OF THE AMERICAN BOOKSELLERS ASSOCIATIONFICTION1 THE SEVEN HUSBANDS OF EVELYN HUGO
(Washington Square Press, $17). By Taylor Jenkins
Reid. A Hollywood icon recounts the story of her
glamorous life to a young reporter, and both discover
the cost of fame.2 KLARA AND THE SUN (Vintage, $16.95). By Kazuo
Ishiguro. Solar-powered robot Klara, an Artificial
Friend, is selected as a companion for a sickly child.3 WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING (Putnam, $18). By
Delia Owens. A young outcast finds herself at the
center of a local murder trial.4 IT ENDS WITH US (Atria, $16.99). By Colleen Hoover. A
woman questions her relationship with a commitment-
phobic partner when her old flame appears.5 THE SONG OF ACHILLES (Ecco, $16.99). By Madeline
Miller. The legend of Achilles retold from the point of
view of his friend Patroclus.6 VERITY (Grand Central, $16.99). By Colleen Hoover. A
writer hired to complete an incapacitated best-selling
author’s manuscript learns disturbing secrets.7 CIRCE (Back Bay, $16.99). By Madeline Miller. This
follow-up to “The Song of Achilles” is about the
goddess who turns Odysseus’s men to swine.8 THE PAPER PALACE (Riverhead, $18). By Miranda
Cowley Heller. A dalliance with an old flame causes a
woman to question her life’s choices.9 OH WILLIAM! (Random House, $18). By Elizabeth
Strout. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s final
installment in a trilogy finds Lucy Barton struggling to
understand her ex-husband.10 THE HOUSE IN THE CERULEAN SEA (Tor, $18.99). By
TJ Klune. A caseworker is sent to investigate six
magical misfits at an island orphanage.NONFICTION1 BRAIDING SWEETGRASS: INDIGENOUS WISDOM,
SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE AND THE TEACHINGS OF
PLANTS (Milkweed Editions, $18). By Robin Wall
Kimmerer. Essays by an Indigenous scientist offer
lessons in reciprocal awareness between people and
plants.2 THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE (Penguin, $19). By
Bessel van der Kolk. A scientific look at how trauma
can reshape a person’s body and brain.3 ALL ABOUT LOVE (Morrow, $15.99). By bell hooks.
The first volume in the feminist’s Love Song to the
Nation trilogy considers compassion as a form of love.4 MAUS I: A SURVIVOR’S TALE: MY FATHER BLEEDS
HISTORY (Pantheon, $16.95). By Art Spiegelman. The
Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel recounts the
ordeal of the author’s father during the Holocaust.5 A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN (Random House,
$18.99). By George Saunders. The award-winning
author shares his approach to fiction by analyzing the
short stories of four Russian writers.6 THE SPLENDID AND THE VILE (Crown, $20). By Erik
Larson. A look at how Winston Churchill led Britain
through World War II that explores his political
gamesmanship and his family dynamics.7 EDUCATED (Random House, $18.99). By Tara
Westover. A memoir by a woman from a survivalist
family who earned a PhD at Cambridge.8 BETWEEN TWO KINGDOMS (Random House, $18).
By Suleika Jaouad. A cancer diagnosis derails future
plans for a recent college graduate.9 ENTANGLED LIFE (Random House, $18). By Merlin
Sheldrake. A biologist explains the importance of fungi
to our bodies and the environment.10 THE PREMONITION (Norton, $17.95). By Michael
Lewis. The best-selling author recounts the story of
health experts who fought to raise the alarm over the
pandemic.MASS MARKET1 DUNE (Ace, $10.99). By Frank Herbert. In the classic
science fiction novel, a young boy survives a family
betrayal on an inhospitable planet.21984 (Signet, $9.99). By George Orwell. The classic
novel about the perils of a totalitarian police state.3 BRIDGERTON: THE DUKE AND I (Avon, $9.99). By
Julia Quinn. In Regency London, a young lady and a
duke agree to a false courtship, which develops into
something more.4 THE WAY OF KINGS (Tor, $9.99). By Brandon
Sanderson. The first volume in the Stormlight Archive
series.5 ANIMAL FARM (Signet, $9.99). By George Orwell.
Animals stage a workers’ coup on a farm, then devolve
into a totalitarian state, in this classic broadside
against Stalinism.6 DUNE MESSIAH (Ace, $9.99). By Frank Herbert. The
second book in the Dune Chronicles picks up the story
of Paul Atreides 12 years after he becomes emperor of
the known universe.7 THE DIARY OF A YOUNG GIRL (Bantam, $7.99). By
Anne Frank. The diary of a 13-year-old Jewish girl as
she hides from the Nazis in an attic during World War
II.8 BETTER OFF DEAD (Dell, $9.99). By Lee Child and
Andrew Child. Itinerant sleuth Jack Reacher’s search
for a woman’s missing twin brother uncovers
dangerous secrets.9 THE NAME OF THE WIND (DAW, $10.99). By Patrick
Rothfuss. Kvothe the Kingkiller tells the story of his
rise to near-legendary heroism.10 AMERICAN GODS (Morrow, $9.99). By Neil Gaiman.
Journeying across America, a freed convict encounters
an assortment of mortals and immortals fighting a war
for the country’s soul.Rankings reflect sales for the week ended May 1. The charts may not be
reproduced without permission from the American Booksellers Association, the
trade association for independent bookstores in the United States, and
indiebound.org. Copyright 2022 American Booksellers Association. (The
bestseller lists alternate between hardcover and paperback each week.) Bestsellers at washingtonpost.com/booksDaniel Oppenheimer is the author of “Far From
Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art.”past and present, airing its hidden racial and
sexual laundry, drawing on the well of dark
genius that produced plays like “Glengarry
Glen Ross” and “Oleanna” to wave back at us
all our unmentionables.
Who better, in this hypothetical, to chal-
lenge and provoke the left than a bare-knuck-
le Jew like Mamet, Chicago-born and bred,
conqueror of the New York theater world,
veteran of the L.A. movie world,
scourge of self-delusion and perfor-
mative piety, relative latecomer to
conservatism? Who better to tell us
what acts of repression and self-de-
ception are being performed right
now by right-thinking leftists and
liberals? God knows we could use it.
If only. Telling an author what he
should have written is one of the
cardinal sins of book criticism. In the
case of “Recessional,” though, it
seems like the only critically generous
thing to do. Because the alternative is
to dwell on the book as it is, which is a
pale facsimile of my hypothetical.
“Recessional” isn’t really a book at all
but a McBook. It’s a collection of
disparate pieces, written mostly as
columns for National Review, that are
given back to us in book form only
because the author has a big name and there’s
some money to be made — or at least a
valuable relationship to be massaged. Mamet
doesn’t like public school teachers. He doesn’t
like pacifists. He likes Donald Trump. He likes
Israel. He doesn’t like Black Lives Matter or
Occupy Wall Street. He likes God. He doesn’t
like coronavirus restrictions. He really, really
doesn’t like liberals.
There’s nothing wrong, in principle, with
this set of likes and dislikes, and I can imagine
a collection of columns (there I go again) thatT
here’s an essay early in David Mamet’s
new book, “Recessional: The Death of
Free Speech and the Cost of a Free
Lunch,” that offers a tantalizing glimpse of
what the book could have been, were the
celebrated playwright’s brains not so irradiat-
ed by right-wing media and memes. The essay,
“King Kong,” takes as its starting point the
racial and erotic subtext of the 1933 movie
about a big black ape who desperate-
ly, violently desires a White woman.
Kong dies, writes Mamet, “clutch-
ing both her and the world’s biggest
erection, overcome by the mechani-
cal contrivances of the puny white
men who, as unaided individuals,
had no hope of combating his animal
lust.”
Why, asks Mamet, were White
audiences so eager to watch such a
film? His answer, informed by Freud,
is repression. Repression followed by
the need to deal, unconsciously, with
what has been repressed. Fear of
Blackness. Guilt and shame at the
violence visited on generations of
Black people. Envy, etc. A bouilla-
baisse of conflicting and unacknowl-
edgeable desires, fears and animosi-
ties that needs somehow to be me-
tabolized. This is where the alchemy of
popular culture comes in, says Mamet. A
movie like “King Kong” takes the repressed
feelings and then veils and remixes them
enough to allow them back into view, where
they can be eagerly consumed by a public in
need of relief from its agitated unconscious.
So far so good. This is interesting cultural
criticism, written by someone who knows
from culture. I can imagine a different book in
which Mamet takes such insights and goes
even deeper into the American unconscious,is interesting and stylish enough to justify
itself as a book. But Mamet in “Recessional” is
a lazy writer. There are charming passages
here and there, particularly when he’s reflect-
ing on his professional experience or musing
on the challenges of being an artist. But
there’s a slapdash quality to it all, an un-
earned confidence that his writerly instincts
are so potent that a few anecdotes or
observations strung together, tied up at the
end with a callback to the beginning, will
naturally coalesce into profundity. That asso-
ciative, jump-cutting style can work, but you
have to know how to do it, and even then you
have to work at it. Mamet seems beyond
working at it, and I presume beyond receiving
or accepting honest feedback from editors or
friends.
Mamet is also, on the evidence of this book,
a lazy reader. We are blessed right now with a
surplus of writers and intellectuals critiquing
the left with great subtlety and sophistication.
Some are conservatives. Others are dissenting
liberals and leftists. Mamet seems to have
read or listened to none of them. He seems
instead to be in dialogue only with vulgar
right-wing sources. Rush Limbaugh, I sus-
pect, was an influence (Mamet mentions a
now-dead radio host). Maybe Mark Levin and
Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson. Mamet’s
writing is a little bit more interesting than
these guys’ demagoguery. He knows history.
He’s read Freud and Beckett.
What’s depressing is that he should be
vastly more interesting than them, and he’s
not. He’s David effing Mamet, one of the great
living playwrights of the English-speaking
world, a brilliant man and an extraordinarily
stylish writer. Even at 74, an age when all but
the rarest of us are past our primes, he should
be better. That he’s not is an indictment of
him but also of our times — of Twitter and
Facebook, Fox News and MSNBC, National
Review and the woke ACLU. They’re eating
our brains. We need to figure out how to stop
them, without becoming them.ESSAYS REVIEW BY DANIEL OPPENHEIMERIn these disappointing essays,David Mamet can’t close the dealRECESSIONAL
The Death of
Free Speech
and the Cost of
a Free Lunch
By David Mamet
Broadside.
240 pp. $28.99ERNESTO S. RUSCIO/GETTY IMAGES
A new book collects pieces from conservative playwright David Mamet, mostly columns for National Review.