Spy of the First Person

Starred review from January 29, 2018
This slim but potent volume, which playwright Shepard (The One Inside) finished shortly before his death in 2017, alternates two voices in a poignant, unsettling double monologue. One narrator is a man who spends most of his time sitting in a “rocking chair that looks like it was lifted from a Cracker Barrel” on the porch of a house in the Southwest, and who occasionally makes family outings to a local Mexican restaurant or to a prestigious medical clinic founded by two brothers from Minnesota. On the porch, he talks to himself, or to his son, recalling events they shared or didn’t. Across the road, someone else observes him, trying to make sense of him. The observer watches the porch sitter eat cheese and crackers and notes dispassionately that “his hands and arms don’t work much,” while the sitter himself prefers to dwell in the past, since the present has little to offer. Elegant, unpretentious, funny, and touching without demanding sympathy, the book, edited with the help of Shepard’s friend Patti Smith (Just Kids), gently escorts the reader out to the edge where life meets death.

Before playwright and actor Sam Shepard passed away last July from ALS, he struggled to write and dictate this final work with the help of family members. He would have been pleased to hear it performed by Michael Shannon, whose delivery strikes the perfect balance between gruffness and lyricism. His narration would likely be too slow and languid if this were a 20-hour epic, but it's ideal for this spare novella. The semiautobiographical sketches are told by a man suffering from a debilitating illness who reflects on the events of his life, a changing America, and his love of his family. Shannon weaves each of them with a voice that contains echoes of Shepard himself. D.B. � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine