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The Old Religion by David Mamet. Free Press. $24. 208 pages.
The lynching of Leo Frank refuses -- like Lady Macbeth's bloodstains -- to stay hidden. Most shocking is that the crime wasn't part of a remote and barbaric past but happened only a lifetime ago (1915) in a city that was not yet too busy to hate.
Frank, a New York-born Jew, was falsely convicted of murdering a 13-year-old girl in an Atlanta pencil factory, then dragged from prison by an anti-Semitic mob and castrated and hanged from a Marietta tree. The tale has been told as historical narrative (Night Fell on Georgia) and made-for-TV movie (The Murder of Mary Phagan) and is being made into a musical drama in Toronto (Parade, scripted by Atlanta native Alfred Uhry).
It is puzzling and intriguing to see David Mamet, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter, retell the story as a novel that darts in and out of Frank's head. Puzzling, because in The Old Religion the first-person, stream-of-consciousness voice is so different from anything the Master of Dialogue has attempted, and it sometimes lacks his usual relentless momentum and stinging clarity.
Intriguing, because the slim book is of a piece with Mamet's brilliant body of work. As in his film Homicide, he plunges into the mystery of what ethnic identity means in the American melting pot. As in his plays, Mamet rips the skin of illusion off a system of human transactions that is -- like Hobbes' vision of life -- nasty and brutish.
The illusion, to Mamet's Frank, is that somehow logic and decency must prevail. In his jail cell, the factory manager's mind wanders from provocative ruminations on God, justice and the guilt of possessing wealth to subjects both tedious (a Hebrew dictionary) and banal (paper clips). Mamet illustrates Frank's denial, his evasion of reality in the quiet chamber of his thoughts, but at the risk of boring the reader.
The ennui is passing, however, and not too high a price to pay for the final devastating pages. It could even be argued that the slack, unfocused passages are a vital setup for the climax. The players in Frank's trial -- girls who accuse him of lecherous advances and exposing his "deformed" genitals, the black janitor who escapes suspicion by groveling before the prosecutor -- are lurid, obvious performers, as manipulative as the crew in the O.J. Simpson criminal trial. Frank finally sees his accusers as "swine... interested in his sex, his penis, his habits. As if he were a specimen captured by savages who'd never seen a white man."
From this point Frank's oddly becalmed story takes off at horrific speed, like a ride down an abattoir chute.
There is grist here for hot debate. Just as Mamet's Oleanna enraged feminists with its depiction of a cowardly student falsely accusing her professor of rape, Religion could be read as a justification of hate against the haters, implicating innocent people in the Frank crime. ("He could see both men in some club. Bursting with self-congratulation. Calling the evil good. How like a Christian, he thought.")
The Old Religion is a strange and sometimes exasperating book. But a book to be reckoned with. And impossible to put down.
The Verdict: The playwright creates a first novel [N.B. - This is actually his third novel. His first two were The Village and Passover. - J.C.] to be reckoned with.
Copyright 1997 Cox Interactive Media