and most of those avoid naming names. Hollis’s family gets short shrift as well; his wife and daughter are only mentioned briefly. (One lengthy anecdote in Recollections describes Hollis’s reaction to a question his daughter asks.)

In his “memoir,” Hollis discusses philosophy, religion, and several other esoteric subjects. Chapter titles include “Self-Confidence,” “Pedagogy Examined,” “A Legal Opinion,” “The Bible,” “Doubt,” “Good and Evil,” and “Philanthropy.” There’s plenty of room here for Mamet to express his own opinion on these subjects, and he occasionally does so. Unfortunately, he usually hides the points he’s trying to make in a barrage of word salad. A sample quote from a chapter titled “First Do No Harm”: “The Luddites, rick-burners, Rousseauvians, and modern practitioners of Permissive Education hark back to pastoral times, when the young could, perhaps, be left free to learn from nature, their acculturation into Society accomplished by the necessity of communal labor on the Land.” (capitalizations in the original text)

I think the point Mamet is making here and in several other places in Recollections is the uselessness of “higher education,” as practiced by St. Ives in the 1920s and, by extension, at many exclusive colleges today. A valid point, but most people will be tempted to consult a dictionary when confronted with that paragraph or just bravely soldier on. Repeat that paragraph with different vocabulary-challenging words several dozen times, and you get an idea of what it was like to read Recollections. Its 200 pages seemed more like 500. Hollis’s “memoir” proves Mamet’s point that years of education at schools like St. Ives produced a book that’s a confused muddle. To further prove his point, Hollis’s “editor” inserted a footnote showing that Recollections was originally a vanity publication of 1,000 copies, to be distributed to incoming St. Ives students in years to come. (Left unsaid was the obvious conclusion that few of these students would ever actually read the book.)

What is also left unsaid in Recollections are stories or anecdotes about actual people, whether students or teachers. A headmaster like Hollis must have had many interesting students or fellow faculty members over the years whose time at St. Ives could have formed the basis for either high drama or low comedy. The closest this alleged memoir comes is a couple of references to infamous criminals who attended St. Ives in their formative years, including, in a footnote, a pair of students who surrendered to Hollis. This pair seems patterned after Leopold and Loeb, and a chapter about that incident, as told by David Mamet, would have made Recollections a much more entertaining book.

Mamet makes some interesting points with his Hollis anecdotes, once readers decipher them and peel away the excess verbiage to reveal the fruit underneath. He relates one story twice in slightly different forms. That anecdote concerns the school library’s copy of Arabian Nights, a book considered risque in the 1930s. The school’s headmaster at the time (before Hollis assumed the position) kept the original copy under lock and key, but let it be known through the scholarly grapevine that another copy was in the library. Naturally, the library copy became quite popular with students, who were then flustered to discover that the “good stuff” was written in Greek. The purpose of this elaborate charade, of course, was to encourage students to study enough Greek to decipher the text. An amusing tale, but one that would have been far better in far fewer words.

I can’t judge Some Recollections of St. Ives by what David Mamet didn’t write, like the story of the two students who surrendered to Charles Hollis, as potentially fascinating as that saga might have been. Unfortunately, what he actually wrote is an overblown mess. The book is a one-note joke expanded to 200 pages of mostly boring, at times nearly incomprehensible scholarly babble. If I had written this book and submitted it to a publisher, it would at best have been blue-penciled to death, but, more likely, summarily rejected. However, publishers don’t reject or edit David Mamet, so readers are stuck with works like Some Recollections of St. Ives. They would be far better advised to try almost any of David Mamet’s other novels or plays instead.  

NOTE: The publisher graciously provided me with a copy of this book through NetGalley. However, the decision to review the book and the contents of this review are entirely my own.