JUNE 2018 - AudioFile
David Mamet's latest opus would work better as a play—the kind he won a Pulitzer Prize for writing—but it also succeeds as an audiobook. Skilled narrator Jim Frangione does his level best to help listeners keep track of who is speaking in a novel that is 99 percent dialogue. Still, it's a fascinating trip to the seedy side of post-WWI Chicago—even with its verbose, overblown conversations. Reporter Mike Hodge is obsessed with the murder of a young woman and uses all his skills to find her killer regardless of who is involved. Everyone talks like they are in a James Cagney movie, but there is some real passion here. M.S. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
02/12/2018
Playwright Mamet returns to the scene of one of his greatest successes, the screenplay for Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, with his new novel, set in Chicago during Prohibition in the 1920s. Mike Hodge is a veteran pilot of the Great War and current reporter for the Tribune. In a very Mamet touch, the book begins with a literary conversation between Mike and fellow reporter Clement Parlow in a duck blind. But in no time, Mike is racing off to find the killer of his girlfriend, Annie Walsh. All he has to go on is a fuzzy photo of two unknown men at the funeral of nightclub owner Morris Teitelbaum, so Mike cuts a swath through gangland Chicago. All this is basically just an excuse for the author to exercise his patented talent with dialogue (“There’s this to say for a broken heart, it keeps your weight down”). Unfortunately, this works better in his plays than here, where the highly charged conversations slow down the haphazardly plotted story. But Mike proves himself the spiritual kin of Chicago reporter Hildy Johnson from Hecht and MacArthur’s The Front Page, and Mamet’s Chicago setting is immersively evoked. (Feb.)
Sunday Mail
The finest American writer of his generation.
Harvard Crimson
Full of twists and surprises…Mamet’s new novel is a treasure, a piece of fictitious history entrenched in an era of violence and love.
Booklist (starred review)
Acclaimed playwright (Glengarry Glen Ross) and screenwriter (The Untouchables) Mamet unpacks his literary arsenal in his first novel in two decades…. Mamet offers a master class on dialogue…. For readers of Elmore Leonard and Dennis Lehane.
The Times Literary Supplement
Chicago is tremendous fun, with much to savour.
Wall Street Journal
Tommy guns, bootleggers and hard-living newsmen: David Mamet adds a vivid novel to a legendary tradition.
USA Today
Splendid… a riveting crime drama in a throwback journalistic world, a time when you could yell for a copy boy to bring you Dixie cups for your illegal liquor. But this novel has a romantic heart, and the emotional stakes complement the whiskey-drenched whodunit.
Los Angeles Times
As if Cormac McCarthy had decamped from Southwest to Midwest…Chicago feels like one of the great American male novelists of the late 20th century — Updike, Mailer, Bellow, Roth—trying his hand at writing a genre novel. But unlike those novelists’ somewhat less sure-footed lunges…Mamet lands this with aplomb.
New York Times
All the trademarks of a Mamet production — electric dialogue and a hurtling pace.
Booklist
Acclaimed playwright (Glengarry Glen Ross) and screenwriter (The Untouchables) Mamet unpacks his literary arsenal in his first novel in two decades…. Mamet offers a master class on dialogue…. For readers of Elmore Leonard and Dennis Lehane.
JUNE 2018 - AudioFile
David Mamet's latest opus would work better as a play—the kind he won a Pulitzer Prize for writing—but it also succeeds as an audiobook. Skilled narrator Jim Frangione does his level best to help listeners keep track of who is speaking in a novel that is 99 percent dialogue. Still, it's a fascinating trip to the seedy side of post-WWI Chicago—even with its verbose, overblown conversations. Reporter Mike Hodge is obsessed with the murder of a young woman and uses all his skills to find her killer regardless of who is involved. Everyone talks like they are in a James Cagney movie, but there is some real passion here. M.S. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2017-12-12
A major bard of the Windy City returns, this time with a novel devoted to the mob era and some of its more minor players.Aside from a few questionable forays into right-wing politics, Mamet (Three War Stories, 2013, etc.) is heard from too little these days. That's unfortunate, because few writers are better at bringing the smart, charged dialogue of the theater into conventional prose. "They loved your quip, about 'he died of a broken heart,'" says Parlow, a journeyman writer on every topic of culture and commerce imaginable, to his pal Mike Hodge, a hard-boiled reporter for the Trib who is much admired and much feared. "You should have been there, they picked up the tab for dinner." "They" are one of the several crews of very bad gangsters who have just "iced" Jacob Weiss, a showman knee-deep in misbehavior. But who? Therein hangs one of several mysteries, the largest of them the identity of the fellow who iced Mike's girlfriend, Annie Walsh, as Mike and she were freshening up after a tryst. Not a good idea: Mike is a former fighter ace ("He had killed in France, in the air, which he did not mind at all; and killed strafing ground troops, which upset him") who won't be thrown off a scent—and the stench of murder and mayhem is thick. The story moves at a careening pace, drawing on a small but memorable cast of characters, with cameos by a few historical figures; the palaver isn't as snappy as, say, House of Games, but it's brisk and believable. Readers should note that there's scarcely an ethnic group that doesn't come in for a slur along the way, but that's part of the verisimilitude: these are not nice people, excepting the deceased Annie—and even she has a few dark corners. Of a piece with character studies such as E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime and John Sayles' Eight Men Out, Mamet's book does Chicago—and organized crime—proud.An evocative, impressive return that Mamet fans will welcome.
