The One Inside

January 23, 2017
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.

February 1, 2017
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 speaking--but 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.

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Starred review from February 1, 2017
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, andgraced 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

September 15, 2016

Shepard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of more than 55 plays and three story collections, plus a screenwriter, director, and Academy Award-nominated actor. What's left to do? Write a novel, of course. This work's actor/writer protagonist recalls significant people and places in his life while trying to persuade a young woman not to publish their dark and damning phone conversations.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 1, 2017

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 Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2017

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 Journal, LLC Used with permission.