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Summary
Summary
The first work of long fiction from the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright--a tour de force of memory, mystery, death, and life.
This searing, extraordinarily evocative narrative opens with a man in his house at dawn, surrounded by aspens, coyotes cackling in the distance as he quietly navigates the distance between present and past. More and more, memory is overtaking him: in his mind he sees himself in a movie-set trailer, his young face staring back at him in a mirror surrounded by light bulbs. In his dreams and in visions he sees his late father--sometimes in miniature, sometimes flying planes, sometimes at war. By turns, he sees the bygone America of his childhood: the farmland and the feedlots, the railyards and the diners--and, most hauntingly, his father's young girlfriend, with whom he also became involved, setting into motion a tragedy that has stayed with him. His complex interiority is filtered through views of mountains and deserts as he drives across the country, propelled by jazz, benzedrine, rock and roll, and a restlessness born out of exile. The rhythms of theater, the language of poetry, and a flinty humor combine in this stunning meditation on the nature of experience, at once celebratory, surreal, poignant, and unforgettable.
Author Notes
Sam Shepard was born Samuel Shepard Rogers III on an army base in Illinois on November 5, 1943. He briefly studied agriculture at Mount San Antonio College, but dropped out to move to New York in 1962. He wrote more than 55 plays during his lifetime. His first play was produced off-off-Broadway when he was 19 years old and he won the first of his 8 Obie Awards when he was 23 years old. His plays included Chicago, The Tooth of Crime, True West, Fool for Love, A Lie of the Mind, The Late Henry Moss, Heartless, and A Particle of Dread. He received the Pulitzer Prize for drama for Buried Child in 1978.
He was an actor for both film and television. His films included Days of Heaven, The Right Stuff, and Baby Boom. He also appeared in the Netflix series Bloodline. He wrote or co-wrote several screenplays including Far North and Renaldo and Clara with Bob Dylan. He also wrote songs with John Cale and Bob Dylan including Brownsville Girl. He wrote several books including Cruising Paradise and Motel Chronicles. He died from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis on July 27, 2017 at the age of 73.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In the longest work of fiction to date from the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, an aged actor moves through his fragmented memories of his father, the young girl who loved him, and the vast American landscape that served as a backdrop to it all. Following a poignant foreword by Patti Smith, each successive chapter of the novel flits among times and forms: there are poetic reminiscences of the actor's ex-wife, and terse all-dialogue conversations between him and the lover intending to blackmail him. Coloring those dynamics are flashbacks to the actor's complicated relationship with Felicity, his father's underage girlfriend, who also comes to take the actor's virginity. Mixed amongst these grounding story lines are vivid scenes of his father's death, drug fantasies, and vague meditations on sex and death. The last section of the book concerns Felicity's disappearance and apparent suicide, an event that deepens and bonds every moment that precedes it. Though some of the writing feels like leftovers from discarded drafts of books and plays, much of the content remains striking and memorable, illustrative of what makes Shepard's work so arresting on the screen and the page. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In the newest work of fiction by celebrated playwright, actor, and writer Shepard (Day out of Days, 2010), a writer and actor on in years looks back at his life, while negotiating an increasingly volatile relationship with a much younger woman. The nameless narrator refers to his tormentor as the Blackmail Girl because she claims to have recorded and transcribed their phone conversations with the intention of publishing them. They clash in taunting and seductive encounters rife with lacerating dialogue that alternate with bruising scenes from his hardscrabble boyhood, when he became infatuated with voluptuous teen Felicity, who was having a scandalous affair with his father. In a slowly cohering jigsaw puzzle of flashbacks and jump cuts, memories and dreams, Shepard's piercingly observant and lonely narrator broods over the mysteries of sexual enthrallment, age's assaults, and the abrupt demise of his 30-year marriage in finely etched vignettescapturing the poignant moods of wind, sky, the open road, birds, dogs, and coyotes; high drama in a Denny's; absurdities on a film set; and hallucinatory visions of his dead father's corpse shrunken to doll-size. Shepard is a master of conflicting emotions and haunting regrets, and graced with a foreword by Patti Smith (M Train, 2015) this is a ravishing tale of deep-dark cosmic humor, complex tragedy, and self-inflicted exile. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Shepard is a literary and cinematic star, and interest in this hotly anticipated and provocative work will be avid.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
"YOU CAN'T go home again." Thomas Wolfe's famous phrase has long served as a dictum for writers and analysands, but it needs an addendum: You can't stop trying. Sam Shepard has acknowledged the compulsion - and also the futility - in interviews and dramatized it in plays where protagonists return to the place that's supposed to take you in, but doesn't. They come home not for comfort but to settle scores, demand respect, even elicit an acknowledgment of their existence. Family members in extremis shout and holler, hoping, like the father in "Buried Child," that the sounds they make will signal an affirmative reply to the question, "Are we still in the land of the living?" This question floats over Shepard's novella of short-burst imaginings and conversations with himself, as the aging narrator ruefully takes stock. He's in the land of the living, but only just, hanging on by his fingernails, his memory, his imagination, his never-ending obsession with his father, his blue thermal socks (nicked from a movie set) and his ongoing arguments with women, including a sometime-girlfriend 50 years his junior. She's called the Blackmail Girl because she's recording their conversations for a book that will launch her literary career. Maybe. There's a wry poetic justice in the spectacle of a writer, that scavenger of others' lives, helplessly furnishing material for another. The voyeur voyeured. "The One Inside" is less a stand-alone performance than Shepard's short story collections, but it takes its place as a satisfying chapter in the autobiographical stream of consciousness that flows through his plays. Masculinity and its perils, the primitive drama of sibling and father-son rivalry, are the wellsprings of Shepard's work. Here the narrator realizes he's a year older than his father was when he died, but the man still looms over the present. The bomber pilot of World War II figures in hallucinatory portraits, vignettes that are the son's way of steer-wrestling him to earth. In a scene that reprises Shepard's striking story "Tiny Man," the father is not only dead but shrunken, a minuscule corpse in Saran Wrap. In the presence of the mourners, or mobsters, who've delivered him, the son reveals the old man's wizened face. At times the narrator's own body seems to be disintegrating. There are thoughts of suicide even as Eros struggles to assert its sway over Thanatos. We are taken back to a primal scene, shocking and vivid, when the young boy walks in on his father making love with Felicity, a girl hardly older than he is. While the father lies silent, he hears her "scream like a trapped rabbit." Far from retreating in fear, he is fascinated, even turned on. In the aftermath, Felicity still screaming her pleasure, the boardinghouse landlady wonders if there's a murder being committed, calls the cops. Felicity winds up on the sidewalk, clutching a sheet over her voluptuous front, as his father is hauled off to jail. They're kicked out of the boardinghouse, marking the boy's expulsion from innocence if not paradise. In the son's acting out of the Oedipal triangle, he will continue to see Felicity, talk to her, have noisy sex with her, wonder about his father's reaction. He will recapitulate the old man's fondness for young flesh in his coupling with the Blackmail Girl, enjoy the disapproval of cast and crew when he takes her with him on a set. Not many Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights are also heartthrobs, but one of the things that have made Shepard so attractive on the screen is our sense of his reluctance to be there. He has a natural antipathy for the movie star life. Here the narrator wrestles with phony parts, dons costumes in an agony, as if they were medieval torture instruments. He seeks authenticity, even as he creates art and artifice as a métier. He's a man of the West, of feedlots and ramshackle cabins, of a silence punctuated only by the sound of crickets, but a man of words as well. He's conflicted, the intellectual versus the Marlboro man, or, as Patti Smith says in her introduction, "he's a loner who doesn't want to be alone, grappling with the incubus." By implication, the battle with the father comes down to words - or lack of them. Is that great wall of paternal silence the "real" man? Is the fancy-pants artist the wimp? In the end, it's David slinging volleys of words at the mute Goliath, and we know who won that battle. MOLLY HASKELL'S most recent book is "Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films."
Kirkus Review
An elegiac amble through blowing dust and greasy spoons, the soundtrack the whine of truck engines and the howl of coyotes.If one word were to define Shepard, the chisel-faced actor and playwright of few words, since his more madcap days of the 1960s, it might be "laconic." So it is with this vignetted story, with its terse, portentous opening: "They've murdered something far off." "They" are the ever-present coyotes, who, of course, kill but do not murder, strictly speakingbut Shepard's choice of words is deliberate and telling. In this Southwestern landscape, where the sand cuts deep, driven by the scouring winds along with the "Styrofoam cups, dust, and jagged pieces of metal flying across the highway," Shepard's actor narrator, wandering from coast to interior and back again, remembers things and moments: the '49 Mercury coupe that delivers his father's mysteriously mummified corpse home, the latter-day bicycle cowboys of Santa Fe, "guzzling vitamin water from chartreuse plastic bottles." Like a cordonazo storm about to break, the atmosphere is ominous, but only just: in Shepard's prose there is always the threat of violence and all manner of mayhem, but then things quiet down, the hangover fades and the talk of suicide dwindles and the stoic protagonist returns to reading his Bruno Schulz at the diner counter. At turns, Shepard's story morphs from novel, with recurring characters and structured narrative, into prose poem, with lysergic flashes of brilliance and amphetamine stutters: "Mescal in silver bottles. Tacos. Parking lots. Radios. Benzedrine. Cherry Coke. Brigitte Bardot." It's a story to read not for the inventiveness of its plot but for its just-right language and images: "Nothing but the constant sound of cattle bawling as though their mothers were eternally lost." Cheerless but atmospheric and precisely observed, very much of a piece with Shepard's other work. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Multiple stories and varying narratives are woven throughout this latest work from award-winning writer and actor Shepard. A young boy somewhere out West recounts scenes from life with his father and the strange young woman who had an affair with the father and now hangs around waiting for him while he is at work or elsewhere. The woman friend of an aging actor working on a movie set says that she is going to blackmail him with taped private conversations. Brief chapters, some no more than a few sentences, alternate with screenplay-like dialogs of a man and a woman arguing; dreamlike sections feature mobsters and a corpse of the narrator's father; romances long past are rehashed and pondered; and the young woman who was mixed up with the father dies or disappears, which prompts an investigation. Yet it all fits together into a marvelous whole. Verdict Readers will get caught up in this work's many scenarios, as the observations of place and character ring true, and a world-weary resignation in the setting of vast Western landscapes permeates the narrative. [See Prepub Alert, 8/22/16.]-James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The One Inside They've murdered something far off. Fighting over it. Yes. Screaming. Doing their mad cackle as they tear into its softness. He's awake--5:05 a.m. Pitch black. Distant coyotes. Must've been. He's awake, in any case. Staring at rafters. Adjusting to "place." Awake, even after a full Xanax, in anticipation of small demons--horses with human heads. All small, as though life-size were too big to fathom. His dogs are on the muscle, howling from the kitchen in feral imitation. Vicious cold again. Blue snow biting at the windowsills: glowing in what's left of the full moon. He throws the blankets back with a bullfighter's flourish and swings both bony knees out into the raw air. He comes, almost immediately, to a straight-backed sitting position, both hands flat on his thighs. He tries to take in the ever-changing landscape of his body--where he resides? Which part? He peers down at his very thick, blue, thermal hiking socks, pilfered from some movie set. Piece of some costume--some character, long forgotten. They've come and gone, these characters, like brief, violent love affairs: trailers--honey wagons--morning burritos--craft service tents--phony limousines--hot towels--4 a.m. calls. Forty-some years of it. Too big. Hard to believe. Too vast. How did I get in here? His aluminum trailer rocks and sways in the howling Chinooks. His young face staring back at him through a cheap 4 x 4 mirror, surrounded by bare light bulbs. Outside, they're shooting film of grasshoppers, falling in great swirling cones from the belly of a rented helicopter. They actually are. In the background--winter wheat, as big around as your thumb, blows in rolling waves. Now, perched on the very edge of his firm mattress, staring down at his thick blue socks, white puffs of breath vaporizing in the morning dark, he knows it's all come true. He just sits like that for a while--straight-backed. A great blue heron waiting for a frog to rise. The house doesn't creak; it's made of concrete. Outside, the aspens moan. He doesn't feel the cold now. It crosses his mind that it's been over two years since the very sudden breakup with his last wife. A woman he'd been with for almost thirty years. Crosses his mind. Pictures. The source? "Am I whining now?" he asks himself, in the voice of a small boy. A boy he remembers, but not him. Not this one, now, quaking in blue thermal socks. s 6:00 a.m.: Wind just now quit after furious blowing out of the south, for three days straight. Air still and much warmer. House even feels hot. Thought--today I'm exactly one year older than my father was when he died. Weird thought, as though it were some kind of achievement rather than raw chance. Rather than happenstance. Pull off black silk long-handles. Female. Electric-blue crackles of static. I see sparks shooting from my chest. Electricity is in me. Take the many pills prescribed by acupuncturist. Line them all up. Colors. Shapes. Sizes. Don't even know what they're for. Just do what you're told. Somebody must know something. Do what you're told. First light cracks through the piñons. Dogs, dead asleep on the kitchen floor, splayed out like they were caught suspended in a gallop. Make coffee in old stained pot. Dump yesterday's grounds. Mice rustling in heat vents, searching for warmth. Thinking about Nabokov's answer to why he writes--"aesthetic bliss"--that's all--"aesthetic bliss." Yes. Whatever that means. Tiny Man Early morning: They deliver my father's corpse in the trunk of a '49 Mercury coupe, dew still heavy on the taillights. His body is wrapped up tight in see-through plastic, head to toe. Flesh-colored rubber bands bind it at the neck, waist, and ankles--mummy style. He's become very small in the course of things--maybe eight inches tall. In fact, I'm holding him now, in the palm of my hand. I ask them for permission to unwrap his tiny head, just to make sure he's truly dead. They allow me to do this. They all stand aside, hands clasped behind their tailored backs, heads bowed in a kind of ashamed mourning but not something you would question them on. It's smart to keep on their good side. Besides, they seem quite polite and stoic now. The Mercury idles with a deep penetrating rumble I can feel through the soles of both shoes. I remove the rubber bands carefully and uncover his face, peeling the Saran Wrap away from his nose very slowly. It makes a sticky sound like linoleum coming free from its glue. His mouth opens involuntarily--some delayed response of the nervous system, no doubt, but I take it as a last gasp. I put my thumb inside and feel his rough gums. Little ripples where his teeth used to be. He had no teeth in life, either--the life I remember him in. I re-wrap his head in the plastic sheathing, replace the rubber bands, and hand him back over, thanking them all with a slight nod, trying to stay in keeping with the solemnity of things. They take him carefully from me and place him back in the dark trunk with the other miniatures. There are shrunken women wedged on either side of him retaining all their alluring features in perfect detail: high cheekbones, eyebrows plucked, lashes caked in blue mascara, hair washed and coifed, smelling like ripe cane sugar. His is the only tiny body that faces completely out toward a band of sunlight. When they close the trunk this band goes to black, as though a cloud has abruptly covered the sun. They stand in a semicircle facing me now, hands clasped over their groins, casually yet formally. I can't tell if they're ex-Marines or mobsters. They seem a mixture of both. I salute each one, rotating counterclockwise. I have the impression that some even click their heels, fascist style, but I may be making this up. I don't know if this rain just started or if it's been going on for some time. I watch them drive off in a light drizzle. That's about all I can remember. Along with these smattered details is a strange morning grief, but of what, I can't say. Felicity In another language, in another time, her name meant "happiness," I guess. "Felicity," I think it was--"Felicity"--yes, that was it. I'd never heard that name before--like from an English novel. Very young. Freckle faced. Red hair. Slightly plump. Adolescent. Always wearing simple cotton one-piece dresses that looked homemade. She'd scream like a trapped rabbit when she sat backward on my father's cock. I'd never heard such ecstasy and horror, all at once. I'd listen from the next room, staring at the ceiling. Something smelled like eucalyptus and Vaseline. They never talked. I'd listen. But they never talked. I'd dare myself to go in there, just go in and appear and don't say a thing. Just stare like some zombie child--a child who just shows up from out of nowhere. What could they do? Stare back. Kick me out? Put on clothes and kick me out? I knew what they were doing, I knew it felt good. I knew it must feel good to be inside another person. Deep inside like that. I went in and there she was. My father's girlfriend sitting ramrod straight--naked almost--as though she were riding a pony backward. Neither of them noticed me. They never turned to see me. She just kept on riding him and screaming recklessly, working her way up and down in a frenzy. He was on his back on a table, staring at the ceiling, his arms folded behind his head, like he might be taking a siesta or listening to the radio. His lips were moving but nothing came out. I walked right up next to them but they never turned to see me. Her pink underwear were on the floor. They looked like they belonged to an older woman, maybe her mother. There was a frantic knocking and banging at the door but neither of them paid any attention. Felicity just kept screaming and pumping away. Sometimes she would lean slightly forward, look down, and examine the penetration closely, without passion. Her mouth was open wide and her hair stuck to the sweat on her forehead. The knocking and banging went on. I went to the door and cracked it. I had my jockey shorts and T-shirt on. It was Mabel Hynes, the landlady, from down the hall. She stood there with a Mexican hairless in the folds of her flabby arms. The dog was silent but kept its ears pricked for each scream. When the scream came, the dog yapped. "What's going on in there? Sounds like someone's getting murdered." "No, it's just my dad." "Your dad? What's he doing?" "Just having fun. He's got a friend with him." "Fun? Doesn't sound like fun to me." "I've never seen her before, actually. This girl." "Yeah, well, tell him if he doesn't find a way to keep the noise down, I'm calling the cops." "Okay." Excerpted from The One Inside: A Novel by Sam Shepard All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
