There are countless lists of the Top 10 American novels on the internet. The Great Gatsby is often at the top. So it gave me pause to hear author David Mamet characterize F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a February YouTube interview with Shilo Brooks, as “not a very good writer,” along with J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
No doubt, the outspoken writer's heretic appraisal of these literary stars would spark much tut-tutting at The New Yorker, but Mamet’s a Second-City guy who prefers Midwestern authors.
Mamet's body of work, spanning four decades, is astounding in its depth and breadth—six novels, 29 credited screenplays, 10 volumes of essays, 11 major full-length plays with Broadway or major West End runs, and a directorial career that includes 13 feature films. The opinions he expresses in this interview are controversial, but they can't be dismissed.
The author says he was sent to a remedial writing class in school because he didn't want to read the books assigned. He cut classes to hang out and read in the stacks of the Chicago Public Library. As an autodidact, he’s distanced himself from the standard aesthetic orthodoxies passed down from teacher to student. The author tells Brooks that neither Fitzgerald nor Salinger “spoke” to him because “they weren't calling a spade a spade.” Their work was too “writerly, in the tradition of Thomas Wolfe.”
If it “sounds like writing,” David Mamet rejects it. In his opinion, these kinds of writers attained their lofty reputation because they made the critics “feel good.” The implication is that critics are easily fooled because, above all, they want to appear to be sophisticated. Self-consciously “arty” work is their weak spot.
This interview is built around a discussion of Main Street (1920), by Sinclair Lewis, the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The novel was a massive commercial and critical success, but Mamet has no use for this author, who he calls “the Midwestern version of Scott Fitzgerald” because he imagines people behaving in certain ways in order to put forward his view of the world.” That view of the world is liberal/progressive, while Mamet’s is hardcore conservative.
The book’s protagonist is a college-educated librarian, Carol Kennicott, who moves to the fictional town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota and gets frustrated with her attempts to bring "culture" and progressive reform to the town. Main Street’s commercial success also sparked an intense regional outrage, due to the portrayal of the humble people of Gopher Prairie as philistine rubes. Mamet’s on their side.
Kennicott wanted to beautify the small town with better architecture and a town hall. Mamet objects, asking, “Who’s going to pay for it?” He calls this liberalism, because when liberals “have an idea about what's beautiful, someone else has to change their behavior.” And foot the bill, too.
The author says he doesn't like Lewis because “he writes about other people,” an opinion that writes off a vast swath of published novels. Mamet compares Lewis’ books to romance novels because all of his characters are one-dimensional stereotypes meant to represent a particular idea or role. He says the books he likes, when he “wants information,” are “instruction manuals”—how to change a tire, how to land a plane, etc. The author doesn't elaborate on this point, but I take it as an exaggerated rejection of the sort of literary didacticism Sinclair Lewis was known for.
Still, Mamet's sometimes cagey about his literary tastes. He says that John Steinbeck was “not a good writer,” and that John Dos Passos was a “wretched writer,” but offers no supporting opinions. Hemingway, however, was a “genius,” as was Shakespeare, who he calls the only writer he can't mimic. Mamet explains his taste in art as “what I like,” using his dislike of kale as an example. Kale lovers can say he's wrong, but by what objective standard are they “right”?
Mamet’s making the case for “aesthetic relativism” in asserting there are no universal objective standards (like the ones Carol Kennicott holds dear) for what constitutes great art. It's all a matter of personal taste. Nobody has the right to tell another person what to like just because, as the author puts it, “they have a degree from the bumfuck school of artistic desecration.”
When institutions of higher learning do this, claiming to represent the “most qualified” experts, the author calls it “gentle fascism.” As he puts it, “It's not the job of art to improve us. It's the job of dictators.”
Shilo Brooks does a good job of interviewing probably the most opinionated intellectual he's ever encountered. He pushes back on Mamet with eloquent reasoning. At the end, however, Brooks drops the ball when the author tells him that Charles Dickens is the writer he loathes the most. Why the interviewer didn't respond with a follow-up question is beyond me, so I had to look it up. In a Wall Street Journal piece from several years ago, headlined "Charles Dickens Makes Me Want to Throw Up," Mamet critiqued Dickens’ prose as "turgid" and "tortured," calling his characters “artificial and lacking depth.”
Mamet rails against didactic authors, but he sometimes sounds didactic in this interview. He's egotistical too. “I'm a very good writer,” he tells Brooks. There's plenty of evidence to support this assertion.
Mamet’s a curmudgeon, so this interview would obviously rub many the wrong way. Still, there's something to be said for people who don't need what art's institutionalized curators offer us in order to keep their jobs. To Mamet, "message" art is usually just bad art because it prioritizes an agenda over the truth. The awful art the Soviet Union once produced is proof of this.
Mamet's views are unsentimental, rigorous, and practical. Writing to him is not art—it’s craft. And craft’s effect is measurable through audience engagement. What that comes to is he's on the reader's side, not the “experts” like critics, who serve their own interests, not those of the reader.