A fascinating book about the place we call home

South of the Northeast Kingdom, by David Mamet, published by National Geographic Directions, hardcover, 152 pages, $20.

reviewed by Bethany M. Dunbar

South of the Northeast Kingdom is a clean, fresh book.  David Mamet is a beautiful writer, and it’s fascinating to read his words about the place he calls home.

Mr. Mamet is famous for writing such screenplays as The Untouchables, Wag the Dog, Heist, and State and Main. He has also written ten books, including a novel called The Village which is set in Vermont, and one called The Old Religion, which is based on an incident in 1913 when a Jewish man was wrongfully accused of murdering a young girl who worked in the pencil factory he managed. The book cover jacket of South of the Northeast Kingdom notes he has received a Pulitzer Prize, two Obie Awards, and two New York Drama Critics Circle Awards.

It’s no surprise that the writing in this book would be excellent. For me the surprise came in the photographs, which are also striking. I didn’t know that photography was one of Mr. Mamet’s talents, but there are too many nice shots to be accidental.  The man has an eye for detail and for nuances of light and shadow.  Good writers need an eye for detail, but they can’t always translate that into skill within the visual arts.  Of course, writing screenplays must force a writer to think more about how things will (or do) look.

Mr. Mamet has this to say about coming to Vermont:

When I was a lad in Chicago I frequented the bookstores. Volume after volume said, at the end of the writer’s bio, ‘He lives in Vermont.’  So I went to Vermont. To pretend to go to college. And stayed on, as it is beautiful, and as it is the perfect place for a writer to live.

It is various, remote, interesting, challenging.

My friend Anita said that one can be many things in Vermont, but it is hard to be lonely. I have found this to be true, as, obviously, have these other craftspeople.

And perhaps the profound order of the environment seduces, as much as does the solitude, to contemplation.

There is, to skirt the mystic for a moment, something in the land. It is different from New Hampshire, which I have always found a dour place, its geography reflected in its inhabitants.  There is a spirit in the countryside itself.  Some places have it, some do not. San Francisco is exhilarating; one cannot say the same for Detroit.

Once when the author was driving by the Capitol building in Montpelier in 1965 on a motorcycle in the middle of the night he found a herd of deer on the front lawn.  Another time he had a question about his state income tax and wandered into the Pavilion building and asked a woman he found inside about getting a form.

‘She asked what the problem was, and I told her, and she said, ‘Let’s have a look at it.’ She did my state taxes for me. She was the state tax commissioner.’

It’s details like these that will make readers unfamiliar about Vermont understand why people like the place.

The book addresses politics: Jeffords was hailed for his heroism.

I think his act should also be noted for its rarity: If our officials are not to follow their conscience and common sense, what, in effect, are they to do?

And the answer is, they will take their legal training, continually confuse ends and means to the debauchment of both, and (in a final decay into intellectual savagery) come to believe that there is, in their tergiversations, some service of some greater good: that, in the fool phrase of the ’60s, ‘the system works.’

Does the system work?  It must.  Containing, as it does, such mindlessness....

First Tuesday in March, Vermont law says there is to be a town meeting, at which the voters will approve or disapprove the budget and various other ordinances.  They shall do so by a show of hands.

This year there is a heated debate, as some faction in town is plumping for the introduction of the Australian ballot.

My friend Chris, the town clerk, beaten into realism through his many years in office, shakes his head at the self-defeating headstrongness of humankind. I translate his gesture to mean: Can they not see that the voter must stand up and declare himself — that the possibility of creating enmity in his neighbors by an unpopular vote is a necessary mechanical and positive component of the open vote? The town government works only when (and because) people are willing to put their names on what they believe in.

I admit I had to look up the word tergiversations. The word tergiversate means to turn one’s back or shift, use evasions or equivocate. I also have to admit that even though I kind of like that word now that I know what it means, I am not in awe of words like that; in fact they usually piss me off. If I ever got the chance to edit Mr. Mamet in this newspaper, that word might just have bit the dust.  In general, what I admire about Mr. Mamet’s writing is his simplicity and clarity. To me he is like the Hemingway of Vermont, and throwing in very long words, in my opinion, takes away from this clarity.  But this is a journalist’s bias, and after all it’s his book, not a newspaper. Anyway the joke’s on me since the damn word made it into my review.

On education:

I did love shop. I turned a maple bowl in shop. I learned to type in typing class, a skill I employ every day. I learned the rudiments of cooking and the operation of a sewing machine.

Perhaps if teachers, if elders want respect, they might do something that merits it — perhaps teach the children a skill.

Educators complain that they are hidebound by the strictures of school boards, who complain that they are in thrall to the budget, to the laws, to publishers.

Those in charge subject the children to constant meaningless testing, whose rules, scoring, and operation invite (if they are not, indeed, designed to require) complicity and fraud.

‘What can I do?’ the educators whine.  In this no doubt legitimate complaint, the young see their elders infantilized, and passing the burden of hypocrisy and drudgery down to their charges.  ‘But what can I do?’ they complain, and wonder why the students don’t respect them.

In a chapter called self-reliance, Mr. Mamet says,

The Stoics, I believe, would nod in recognition of the Vermont ethic.  They put it this way: Admire only those things with which you can reward yourself; abhor only those things you have it in your power to avoid.

In that case, it would be a fine thing to admire this book because for $20 and a trip to the bookstore, you can reward yourself with it.