A swine in Harvard Yard

David Mamet's children's book puts Ivy League angst in the heads of babes.

By Alexandra Jacobs

Dec 15, 1999 | David Mamet's new children's book, "Henrietta," gave me an anxiety attack.

This wasn't the response I'd expected to have. I've never seen a David Mamet play, but his movies and essays always leave a fine, sharp taste in my mouth -- as if I've been admitted into some leathery gentlemen's club for an evening and left with smoke in my lungs but a firmer grasp of the male soul. Mamet, like Hemingway and other old-school newspaper sorts -- with their rat-a-tat phrasing and liberal, almost poetic use of epithets -- proves that literary material need not be verbose or ponderous to be smart. Mamet makes me laugh, but it's not a brainless cackle; instead, I feel wise.

But this tale of a self-educated pig who strives to attend an institution that looks very much like Harvard Law School didn't make me laugh or feel wise. It made me feel nervous. Had I missed the allegory?

I suspect there is some complex philosophical premise at work beneath the tale's apparent wry simplicity. Perhaps it's Talmudic; I know Mamet has gotten very into his Judaism of late. I pictured adults chuckling knowingly while their savvy, Ivy-destined kiddies admired the pictures of the clever animal, who is "brought to life by Elizabeth Dahlie's heartwarming illustrations."

Though "heartwarming" is not the adjective I would have picked, Dahlie's watercolor illustrations of the pig are sweet: She gives Henrietta a beribboned tail, and ears that droop when she is thwarted. Mamet's language here is clean: free of the F-word, with only the occasional dash of his trademark-riddled syntax. (I wonder if the Harvard Coop will stock the $16 book alongside the pricey crimson rah-rah merchandise?)

The plot advances with merciful swiftness. Henrietta is a smart, anthropomorphic oinker who, after schooling herself in solitude on an anonymous East Coast isle, "burns to serve through the Medium of the Law." Sadly, she is rebuffed by the admissions office of the presumed Harvard. (The school itself is never named, but Henrietta dons a crimson-striped muffler and strolls past quasi-fictional landmarks like "Charles Square," and Alan Dershowitz offers a blurb.) Not that this stops her in her quest for knowledge; instead, she "haunted the libraries and folded herself into the backs of the lecture halls."

Of course, the bums kick her out. They even post signs: "No Pigs." (For me, this conjured up a vague memory of Snoopy in some long-forgotten Peanuts cartoon.)

Anyhoo, Henrietta descends into vagrancy -- a common enough condition in Harvard Square, where well-dressed suburban slacker teenagers regularly panhandle along with genuine destitutes -- until a myopic old vagabond proves to be her salvation. I won't give away how he saves her or who he proves to be. Let's just say it ends happily, with Henrietta delivering a noble commencement address worthy of any tweedy social-studies major.

"Let us not be sentimental over the accomplishments of one who comes from a disadvantaged group," she declares, "but let us work for social justice." And so she does, clawing -- or would it be scrabbling? -- her way up to the Supreme Court.

Next Page: Frankly, I am afraid of David Mamet

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