TALES TOLD IN A MINOR KEY
Sam Shepard’s elliptical new book, The One Inside, is labelled a work of fiction, though its hero — a writer and actor who lives in a place that sounds an awful lot like Santa Fe — bears more than a passing resemblance to the author. As his friend Patti Smith writes in a foreword, this character (“a loner who doesn’t want to be alone”) is, simultaneously, Shepard, “sort of him, not him at all”. Like so many of Shepard’s plays and short stories, this narrative explores the confusions of identity, the pull between freedom and roots, and the hard-to-erase dissonances of family life. More specifically, it echoes his galvanic 1985 play, A Lie of the Mind, pivoting around a man’s fiercely conflicted relationships with his father and a woman, and his efforts to mend — or, at least, come to terms with — a past that is both receding and looming over the future.
In this case, there is his estranged wife of almost 30 years, with whom he had two children — the pair still amicably visit, from time to time, reminiscing about their daughter and son, and “how remarkable it was for two stubborn, crusty, old codgers like ourselves to have spawned such mildmannered, calm kids”. But there are other women, too: a much younger one he calls the Blackmail Girl, who abruptly disappears from his life, likely because of his “inattention — lack of texting”; his father’s much younger girlfriend, Felicity, who seduced him when he was 13; and a long string of others whom he invariably abandoned or drove away.
Memories of these women — along with memories of acting jobs, travels and childhood exploits — are woven together here, along with dreams, fantasies and Bosch-like hallucinations. The overall effect recalls Fellini’s 1963 masterpiece 8½ , in which the real, the surreal and the imagined converge, as its film director hero thinks back upon the women in his life. It also recalls All That Jazz (the 1979 Bob Fosse film inspired by 8½ ) — right down to the drug, alcohol or stress-fuelled nightmares and a sudden health crisis.
As in Shepard’s plays, time past and time present blur and overlap in this story, just as boundaries grow fluid and porous. The One Inside is more of a novel, however, than earlier books like Cruising Paradise (1996) and Great Dream of Heaven (2002), which were essentially scrapbooks of narrative fragments, jazzily connected by mood and theme.