Going Along With MAMET : THE CABIN, <i> By David Mamet (Turtle Bay Books: $20; 157 pp.)</i>

In “The Rake,” which leads off this collection of memories and comments, David Mamet tells a story of abuse. Upon his mother’s divorce and remarriage, he and his sister are taken to live in a half-finished suburban development. It smells of fresh plaster, the landscaping is raw, and for the children the new place has no more feeling of home than does their altered family.

There is a cliche breakfast nook and glass-topped table, and there the cliche ends. In periodic rages, the stepfather would smash the glass and cut himself. Once, Mamet’s sister managed to prove to him that a rebuke he had given her was unjustified. After a pause to digest this, he followed her to her room, shoved her and cracked one of her vertebrae. The mother had her own cruelty: On the night her daughter was to star in the school play, she kept her at home because the girl was too nervous to eat dinner.

With the pace and chill deadpan we know from his plays, Mamet builds a sense of appalled dislocation out of these and other incidents, some brutal, some grotesque. At one point, the stepfather browbeats their mother’s terrified immigrant father--who used to hit her when she was a child--to make him say that he loves her. With the short-circuited rationality of a Mamet stage character, the stepfather is engaged in home-kit psychic surgery, like using a chain-saw on a pimple.

Two things happen as we read. We surmise that Mamet is giving us a rare personal glimpse of the Furies that speak through the misshapen logic and contorted loquacity of his characters. We also struggle to figure whether he is leveling with us. He must be; yet his terse, uninflected narration, devoid of reassurance to the reader, makes no concessions to our divided impulse to think his story couldn’t possibly be true and couldn’t possibly not be. On the first level of poker bluff, the point is to make your opponent think you have high cards. On Mamet’s advanced level, the point is to make the opponent (part of his power comes from treating his audience as an opponent) think he is bluffing.

Mamet walks a line between provocation and enticement, and its precariousness almost always compels attention. Some of the pieces in “The Cabin” do no more than that. In his experience of going to Scotland to learn golf and then not learning it, his belligerent pride in fixing up a Victorian house in Boston, and his thoughts about music in public places, the message we hear is Look At Me. In other pieces, the message is Come With Me--and there are enough of them to make this a very worthwhile collection.

He has a lot to show. For example, tenderness, a quality not usually associated with Mamet, though it is plain to see in such plays as “The Woods” and “The Water Engine.” A recollection of moving to New York after his early successes, and taking a small apartment in Chelsea, has an exultant sense of the freedom and possibilities of a city.

There was, for one thing, the heady feeling of being alone, yet--because things were going well--not quite anonymous. He could wander about, bring lovers home, or simply spend nights reading with a bottle of wine. Particularly after the kind of childhood signaled in “The Rake,” solitude meant that for the first time he could keep himself company.

There was also the variousness of getting to know the shops and shopkeepers in a city neighborhood. In the Chelsea piece, in another about Chicago and in a third about London, Mamet evokes his pleasure in browsing among objects of all kinds. Of stationery stores, he writes:

“With their exception, everything in my line of work takes place in my head, which is to say, it is arguable whether it occurs at all.”

The theme is picked up in the title piece. Mamet is never entirely without his tough-guy stance, but “The Cabin” is a movingly unguarded evocation of a writer’s rhythms and emptinesses. He tells of the New Hampshire cabin where he writes, a short walk from his house. He rises from breakfast to announce that he is off to work. Usually, such announcements mean long days of playing solitaire and watching the deer through his window. On the fluent days, he steals from the breakfast table without a word.

Part of the piece describes the objects he has collected and that litter his desk: an old revolver, part of a shell, a rock found by his daughter. Objects are oases of noise in a writer’s silent desert.

Mamet lived in Chicago both before and after college. He worked as a busboy at The Second City, hung out with theater people and began writing his plays there. One of the most winning of the pieces is his recollection of what it meant to listen to the great Chicago nonprofit radio station WFMT, with its music and commentary and such stars as Studs Terkel and Severn Darden. Its announcers had a special way of speaking. In one of those short sentences that Mamet can fill so completely, he writes that this special intonation seemed to say: “Culture is just that which we do.”

Mamet spent some time living in London, and he visited Cannes when his film, “Homicide,” was shown at the film festival. Certainly these are two overwritten subjects, particularly when approached in Mamet’s Innocents (Yahoos) Abroad style. And yet the London piece and parts of the Cannes piece have an unexpectedly fresh appeal.

Both are jet-lagged. In London this gives him a sense of perpetual cold, which he remedies by frequenting tea-shops. Most tourists despise such establishments; they are after the perpetually illusory Authentic Pub. Mamet, free of any fad he has not personally originated, knows that tea is life-blood. London tea, he writes, is the hottest thing in the world, and it actually grows hotter as it sits there.

He tours about, does his laundry in a North London Laundromat, visits secondhand stores, browses junk. He examines the gaudily uniformed Horse Guards in Whitehall and the gangs of skinheads in the Underground stations. They resemble each other, he finds; both have round pink faces and unformed expressions. What a link between Britain’s pomp and her declined circumstance!

As for Cannes, jet lag is perhaps the only authentic way to experience the film festival. Sensibly, Mamet spends a lot of time reconstituting himself on the beach, along with his wife, the actress Rebecca Pidgeon (whom he archly insists on calling Miss Pidgeon). He gives a lucid account of the festival derangements. Of the barn-like Festival Hall, he writes that “each of its dimensions is larger than all the others combined.” And when he and Pidgeon dress for the opening, there is the cosmic void that yawns for most men when they put on formal wear:

“Which of us has not confronted that tuxedo? Yes, our loved one is in the bathroom, engaged in God knows what procession of ritual preparations, and oblivious to all else. There is a spiritual apartheid between the bathroom and the bedroom. The usual connubial cospiritedness that informs the happy home has ceased. One is alone.”