There’s an essay early in David Mamet’s new book...that offers a tantalizing glimpse of what the book could have been, were the celebrated playwright’s brains not so irradiated by right-wing media and memes ... I can imagine a different book in which Mamet takes such insights and goes even deeper into the American unconscious, past and present, airing its hidden racial and sexual laundry ... Who better to tell us what acts of repression and self-deception are being performed right now by right-thinking leftists and liberals? God knows we could use it ... If only. Telling an author what he should have written is one of the cardinal sins of book criticism. In the case of Recessional, though, it seems like the only critically generous thing to do ... There’s nothing wrong, in principle, with this set of likes and dislikes, and I can imagine a collection of columns (there I go again) that is interesting and stylish enough to justify itself as a book. But Mamet in Recessional is a lazy writer ... There’s a slapdash quality to it all, an unearned confidence that his writerly instincts are so potent that a few anecdotes or observations strung together, tied up at the end with a callback to the beginning, will naturally coalesce into profundity ... He’s David effing Mamet, one of the great living playwrights of the English-speaking world, a brilliant man and an extraordinarily stylish writer. Even at 74, an age when all but the rarest of us are past our primes, he should be better.

Anecdotal ... Mr. Mamet is at his best when remembering a conversation or sharing a tidbit of history he has picked up over the years ... He has the artist’s eye for incongruity and the stand-up comic’s sense of timing.

Mamet’s conspiracy theories aren’t exactly harm-ful (the only two kinds of people who’ll finish this book are those who already agree with it and those who’ve been paid to review it), but they’re often breathtakingly stupid ... Mamet didn’t drift to the Right, he sprinted ... Even a broken clock is right twice a day, though, and every dozen pages or so he’ll say something blunt and insightful and pretty much true ... Recessional has its share of pleasures, mostly unintentional but pleasures all the same ... Somebody at Harper Collins...made him capitalize 'Black' — imagining how that Zoom meeting went is almost enough to justify the entire book’s existence.

In many ways this is a story about rebirth and the restorative qualities of nature. Baume avoids clichéd notions of inherent benevolence in the bucolic, highlighting instead the tangible realities of their surroundings ... the author’s style is instantly recognisable. Baume writes sustained and exquisitely realised descriptive passages. She teases the extraordinary out of the ordinary by examining her world and the people in it closely and compassionately, with her best writing emerging after what feels like an extended gaze, held long after most would decide there is nothing left to see. With barely any dialogue, this reads like a prose poem, each line freighted with meaning ... There is a sadness here, but a pleasant one. Baume seems to be suggesting that while isolation in an internal sense may be unconquerable, it can at least be understood.

Pugnacious if undercooked essays ... Though Mamet’s incisive wit and sharp turns-of-phrase are on display, they’re employed in the service of typical right-wing talking points about how universities, the mainstream media, unions, and 'elected leaders on the coasts' have 'conspired to divide and conquer' America ... Though the cultural criticism occasionally hits the mark, the collection’s scattershot quality and grumpy politics will try the patience of all but the most dedicated Mamet fan. These tossed-off musings are more tiresome than edifying.

A playwright once known for brilliant observation delivers an irate diatribe against anyone who doesn’t like Donald Trump ... It’s a bitter, boring litany with one or two accidentally calm observations on the role of playwrights in guiding audiences on how to think about characters, leavening vituperation and right-wing agitprop with oddly juxtaposed nostalgia. A depressing performance best skipped by anyone outside of Trump world.