Knopf Canada
~ Review in Halifax Herald, April 2010
On the surface, Sam Shepard’s latest collection of short stories is a road trip. But just on the surface. Dig a little deeper. These stories don’t follow any traditional route. They wander from town to town, and are sometimes surreal, sometimes touching, often macabre. Some are very short, some not so much. There are random fragments, rants, the occasional monologue, some poetry, and stories from the past. Stories from the heart. They yearn and plead. But always they are searching, wanting, looking for perspective as age gathers in, for a reason for it all. Looking for peace.
Occasionally, there is a story that is downright creepy, although strangely, not the one about the severed head lying in a ditch begging a passerby to take him to a lake (Haskell, Arkansas: Highway 70). Far from it. When the man refuses and passes by, “the head calls out to him in the most forlorn and melancholy voice the man has ever heard.” The man returns. “Do you think you could open your eyes for me? Just once?” asks the man. “No”, says the head, without hesitation. “... you wouldn’t be able to take it.” They strike a deal, the man and the head, and they set out together through several stories.
Shepard’s writing is compelling. With the artistry of a craftsman, he drags his readers in and holds them, page after page. Staccato sentences mark his aggressive, hard-edged style. Land of the Living is a marriage in limbo, partners lost from each other, familiarity and children holding the threads together on the family vacation. “We behaved decently ... remembering the days we were seldom out of each other’s sight and had no reason to doubt we would be forever in love.”
Shepard takes us to the Krispy Glaze donut shop of his youth, to Las Vegas, to Knoxville, Tennessee, through a whiteout in Wichita, Kansas where traffic is stopped dead. “Thank God for Guy Clark on my satellite radio.” But in Gracias, the small, touching finale, Shepard gives his final gift and lets his readers close the book with a soft smile. Perfect!
Sam Shepard is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, author and actor. His books have won many awards, and he has acted in more that thirty movies, receiving an Oscar nomination for The Right Stuff. He lives in New York and Kentucky.
