Chicago
A Novel
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- نقد و بررسی
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نقد و بررسی
February 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.
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
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