Glengarry Glen Ross Book

"Always be closing."

I have seen this performed a couple times and see the film regularly just to get the love of language in it firmly in my head. This won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984 and deserves it. It's about a "down times" real estate agency in Chicago, a recession, properties are just not moving, and the company sets up a kind of contest to encourage its salesmen to work harder. But it's the heart of a neo-liberal system, the guys who are selling the most at this time are given what few "prime" leads that are available. Lame guys just trying to break in, new guys, or older guys down on their luck, having a "bad streak, because it works in streaks," the dice are loaded against them, the cards are marked.

Two days in an office, and over night there's a break-in, the leads are stolen, but hey, the contest is still on. I know, you are a literary reader, or you read romances for fun, who wants to read about a real estate office in the eighties, not one of them truly admirable in any way?! But you do! You just didn't know you did until now. But listen to it or see the amazing movie version with Jack Lemmon.

Set in Mamet's Chicago, where he worked in a real estate office during the sixties, this captures (male) Chicago language rhythms, and American business talk and makes it poetry, just as Harold Pinter does in The Caretaker or The Birthday Party or Betrayal. Or Albee's Virginia Wolff. As good as my other Mamet favorite, American Buffalo, profane and crisp and just crackling with wit and working class desperation. The Death of a Salesman territory, or Seth's Clyde Fans salesmen.

Who cares if Mamet is politically conservative now or that I disagree with so much he has to say in his non-fiction. He can write.

Always be closing, my friends:



Nighthawks:



Always be Quarantining, a parody with American Girl dolls: