Critical Essay | Critical Review by Jack Gibson

Critical Review by Jack Gibson

SOURCE: Gibson, Jack. “Deerhunter in Search of a New Model.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5059 (17 March 2000): 19.

In the following review, Gibson writes favorably of Jafsie and John Henry praising the collection for its wit, trademark terseness, and dramatic style.

Essayists come in three varieties: the self-revealer (Montaigne, Lamb, Woolf, etc), the whistleblower (Bacon, Orwell, Vidal, etc) and, more recently, the audacious villain who dresses up a hotch-potch of slight, repetitive and inelegant magazine-fillers to look like a book (no names). David Mamet as essayist, however, is characteristically awkward to classify. In fact, this new collection possesses more of the qualities which Walter Benjamin, in his essay on Nikolai Leskov, attributed to the traditional storyteller than it does those familiar in the essayist.

The traditional storyteller, according to Benjamin, was often a master craftsman and giver of practical advice. The pieces in Jafsie and John Henry reveal, above...
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