One Inside: A Novel Hardcover – 7 Feb. 2017

Patti Smith ( who wrote the Introduction ) recalls being with Sam Shepard in 2016 and writing alongside him . She was working on what would become Year Of The Monkey . Was he working on The One Inside ?? More than ever probably . If the words of her Introduction are anything to go by : It occurred to me that everything I ever knew of Sam , and he of me , is still inside of us .Then there's that similarity of writing style . Forged in the 1970s when they co-wrote that play together - Cowboy Blues - by pushing a type-writer back + forth across the floor . Was this cross-fertilization of ideas re-kindled all those years later ?? More than ever probably . According to Patti , in 2016 they swapped manuscripts and discussed one another's writing projects . Its striking how many of her books ( Year of The Monkey , M Train , Woolgathering , Devotion ) read like his .Sam Shepard . The One Inside . A perfectly realized snapshot of the interior of one man's mind . The perils of masculinity , relationships that won't grow , reflections from the past . In the words of Chicago Tribune : Mythic . Romantic . Vital + Compelling .

An amazing experience into this late work of Sam Shepard,

Amazing

Bought as a xmas gift and in excellent condition.

I’ve been a fan of the works of Sam Shepard ever since the 1970’s, when I saw a couple of his plays performed at the only avant-garde theater in Atlanta (yes, there was such a time!). Most recently, I’ve read and reviewed Great Dream Of Heaven based on a good recommendation. Thus, when the Vine Program offered me his latest work, I had to say YES, and was not disappointed.A father and son cross swords, as it were, with the same underage girl. Hum. But the girl is older than the son. Hum, redux. This first long piece of fiction by Shepard is relatively short, but is most definitely not to be skimmed. Where and when does this occur? What are the ages of the three protagonists? Shepard maintains dramatic tension by parsimoniously handing out the clues.The story seems to be set in the American West somewhere, among the down and out, the “ragged people” who live in boarding houses. It is in a desert, where the coyotes howl. Then the first tangible clue: Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Then the heavy metals at Los Alamos. Hey! This in New Mexico. In the following pages, the specifics become firmer: The Range restaurant in Bernalillo; Denny’s in Grants. But then Shepard absolutely nailed my familiar lament about my hometown, in its wonderful geographic setting: “We passed Bernalillo, where Coronado had butchered all the locals, and my dad had been run over, near the Sage Café – where they served great chili and eggs. Albuquerque seemed more boring than ever and it is hard to believe that it is the U.S capital of MURDER. Probably because there is nothing else to do.” (Murder is all caps in the original; Shepard’s piece is unlikely to be distributed by the Chamber of Commerce. As I write this, the local paper reports that a woman was found dead in a park, four miles from my house, “under suspicious circumstances,” at 9 am, which has just nudged out the story of a man killed by a shotgun blast, at one of our miteaux motels, at 8 am.)The novel is not all set in “The Land of Enchantment.” Parts are set in California’s San Joaquin Valley, and could have been ripped from The Omnivore's Dilemma: The Search for a Perfect Meal in a Fast-Food World (reissued). Consider: “The thing you remember most about feedlots is the smell- the smell way before seeing the actual cattle, usually Holstein crosses huddled in tight listless bands on top of mounds of their own dung. You imagine them sensing death…” What distinguishes Shepard’s feedlots from Michael Pollan’s are the suggestions WHY someone might be working there, among those mounds…for example the shrapnel scars that he picks at on the back of his skull.There is a Forward by the singer, Patti Smith. Like Leonard Cohen and Janis Joplin (and no doubt, many others) Smith and Shepard had an interlude together at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. Smith commences her Forward by noting that it is a golden Kentucky afternoon, Sam is looking out the window, and she is reading this manuscript. She says: “Glancing up at him, it occurred to me that everything I ever knew of Sam, and he of me, was still inside us. I thought of a photograph of the two of us in New York City, walking past an automat on Twenty-third Street, some forty years ago. It was shot from behind, but it was us, without question, about to embark on separate paths that would surely cross again.” She concludes her Forward by stating that this work: “…is a coalescing atlas, marked by the boot heels of one who has instinctively tramped, with open eyes, the stretches of its unearthly roads.”All good stuff, even “the Right Stuff,” that Shepard once played in, and it deserves a hearty toast: the tramping, the open eyes and the paths that cross again, on those dusty roads that still await. 5-stars.

Sam Shepard, o cowboy das letras norte-americanas, um dos meus ídolos literários, despedaça-se, em forma de personagem, em seu novo livro THE ONE INSIDE, um misto de memórias e ficção impressionista. Chamado pela editora como “o primeiro trabalho de ficção longa do autor”, não chega a ser um romance, é um híbrido, uma expansão de estilo e temas com que ele já trabalhara em MOTEL CHRONICLES (filmado por Wim Wenders como Paris, Texas).A figura central e narrador é um ator e escritor passando por uma crise existencial o que traz à tona memórias antigas e recentes, alegrias e frustrações. Não por acaso o estilo da narrativa é um fluxo que vai e volta no tempo, desnudando o personagem. É Shepard, e também não é. Em um momento, por exemplo, sem dar nomes ele conta sobre uma experiência filmando “August: Osage County”- aqui no Brasil chamado “Álbum de Família”.É o Shepard que conhecemos. Rei da Coolness. Mas é também o Shepard fora dos poucos holofotes a que se submeteu. O personagem fala de sua separação de sua mulher de décadas, dos filhos, da dor de todo o processo. Fala também de um estranho relacionamento, que teve na adolescência, com a jovem namorada de seu pai – poucos anos mais velha do que ele.A narrativa funciona praticamente como um monólogo interior, como um homem juntando seus cacos da vida toda. É algo quase lisérgico. Há uma justiça poética ao passado, sem ser condescendente, sem qualquer autopiedade. Algumas das mulheres de sua vida são o contraponto central, são o gatilho e figuras-chaves nessas memórias.Patti Smith, amiga de anos de Shepard, diz dá o veredito na introdução: “É ele, mais ou menos ele, não é ele de maneira alguma. É uma entidade tentando escapar, compreender as coisas.” É a narrativa de um cowboy na maturidade tentando entender se valeu a pena tudo o que ele laçou na vida. Bem, tudo não se sabe, mas algumas das peças, atuações, roteiros, contos e esse livro valeram muito a pena.

This was a very quick read. I found it a bit confusing due to the episodic nature of the text and the changes from first person to third person as well as occasional unnamed characters where the author just uses pronouns like he or she. As a result I sometimes wondered if the author was talking about his father or himself in the third person. It was possible to piece together a storyline from all the 'episodes', but it wasn't always easy and I wasn't sure if I was getting it right and if that even mattered. For such a short text it has a lot of 'stuff' in it, lots of references to other texts, films, people, historical figures etc and I didn't always get all the references. The thread about "blackmail girl" recording his conversations did make me think about people's diaries and letters being published posthumously and how they would feel about that. I'm still not quite sure what to make of it. I did enjoy 'The One Inside' in a weird, voyaristic sort of way but reading the book also left me feeling somewhat grimy. Certainly an intriguing book and probably a great choice for book groups, where it would generate interesting discussion.

Sam Shepard knows how to brood. His short stories, and now this first novel, are deeply introspective, personal stories. If you’re looking for a lot of action, you won’t find it — what you’ll find is somebody who often doesn’t understand himself, or even doesn’t really so much like what he sees.The story broods its way through three women with whom the narrator (presumably Shepard himself) had relationships.One is “Blackmail Girl”. This is a younger woman, 19, with whom he has a relationship that’s oddly distant and oddly close, strained and easy, and probably dangerous. The “blackmail” part of the story is that she has plans to publish their conversations, with or without his help and even with or without his name. She says their conversations surface all sorts of interesting ideas — he thinks they’re banal. It doesn’t seem like he so much objects as just thinks it’s a dumb thing to do. But she’s always there, and he has a need for her.Another is his wife, now ex-wife. There’s little actually going on there — she’s gone, and her presence in the story feels like a past in which his life had a little more substance if not stability. And he’s swimming now in her absence.The third is from his distant teenaged past, when he still lived with his father. Felicity was his father’s girlfriend of sorts, but she had a habit of coming to visit when she knew his father wouldn’t be there. Felicity is “older” in the way that a few years at that age can mean a lot more, sexually anyway, than at any other age.None of these relationships could be described as healthy and happy. Everyone seems unable to find their balance in them, Shepard least of all. He almost seems mystified by all of the women in his life, and maybe by all the relationships in his life.He doesn’t seem concerned to show that he is a good man. He just is what he is. Pretty flawed, deeply flawed. In fact, that may be what impresses me most about Shepard — that he shows himself that way. He’s an impressively flawed man who will tell you all about it. He overcomes the will to present himself as the good guy, or the guy that has it all figured out.But it’s not like a confession — it’s even grudging in its way, as if Shepard drags himself to his realizations. Take what he says about Blackmail Girl — “I’d like to think of myself as totally innocent — a victim of circumstance — but quickly realized I’d be seen in another light because of our extreme age difference, hers and mine. I mean, it appeared obvious, the lasciviousness, the leering.” Well, yeah, it is obvious, and since he’s talking to himself, it’s obvious to him now, too.There’s a fourth relationship as well, his relationship to his father. It’s also full of distance and closeness, physically and emotionally. His father, in death, is “tiny”. In dreamlike passages, his father appears, sometime with others, as a tiny, wrapped body.Why tiny? The narrator considers possibilities — that his father has simply shrunk over time as part of the aging process, or that he’s distancing himself from his father, that there’s something he’s afraid of in his father even after his father’s death. He talks of his father’s suffering, that maybe he is afraid of that, but then he realizes that the shrinking makes him try to look even closer. It might be that, in fact, he is trying to look closer, to look inside at the suffering.The story’s narrative switches between first person and third person, like how one thinks of his life, sometimes from the inside and sometimes from the outside. But in Shepard’s case, that oscillation is really between how that world inside is seen from the inside and how that same world inside is seen from the outside. Everything is really inside.

I wish I would have started at the library on this one before deciding I wanted to actually own the book. Although I am a big Shepard fan, I am actually surprised this one got published. It appears to be a very early draft of either a screenplay, book of short stories vs. too many ramblings, or a novel that should have been titled Felicity, May Dad, and Me....with the complete removal of the tragic teasers about his health which could have either been saved and more developed in a last chapter or moved to his last book that I have not read yet.This book appears to be a "spilling" about his unresolved and obsessive thoughts of Felicity - I'll leave any potential reader to discover that - and than many indulgent pages on another girl about blackmail. Not sure if that was supposed to be an exercise on the technique of writing dialogue or perhaps he thought he was trying to be funny or clever. I found these sessions uninteresting and lacking any path or resolution. This is the same for his next theme on his father...it didn't really take us anywhere, there was no resolution, reception, acceptance? Just wandering around between other stories, threading some themes form those rambles into other unrelated and not too interesting short stories.The third theme, his illness, which made tiny appearances here and there outside of the one trip to the hospital that provided a bit more detail.The sequence did not line up too well with a story here and there that had nothing to do with the above three themes which appears to be displaced - as in belonged in another book or needed better linkage to the others.I was left empty and bored with only a glimmer of a potential book but where this was way too soon in the process to be published.The forward by Smyth was equally confusing. A ramble that was trying way too hard to be something it couldn't.I am surprised his editor and friends let him off the hook on this one as we know he could have done so much better.

Intensely poetic. I Love the crazy characters and confused chronology of the story line. We zip back and forth in the narrator's mind from a surrealistic childhood to a passionless maturity. Sex is the underlying power of this story. From unbridled desire at thirteen, to ambivalence in his later years. Not a lot of hope here. but Shepard's descriptions are fresh, his verbs surprising and style creatively unique

If you're a fan of Shepard's work, this will not disappoint. It reads as chapters within a short novel. It allows itself plenty of room for digressions. It's funny, mysterious and sad and wrestles with his usual themes/demons. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I first read Shepard when I came across the Rolling Thunder Logbook. Now, 40 years later I read this, his last work before passing. Told in short scenes, memories and dreams, the effect builds and ends powerfully. Thank you, Mr. Shepard.

I'm a big Sam Shepard fan and have been appreciating his books for a long time, but this is a very irregular and somehow "unfished" effort. I tried many times to 'get into it' but over and over again my mind drifted to anything else but the book. Very uninspiring!

Gave as a gift, much appreciated.

I really don't know what to say about this, Shephard's last I think. It's just a strange story, discomforting.

As much as I hate to say it, only a few parts of this book dazzled as expected. Sure, his atemporal approach was good, but the actual writing was plain boring.

A good insight into Sam Shepard and well written.

Unusual way to write your life, but it works for Sam.

Excellent!

I purchased this book thinking it would be Sam Shepard's final thoughts about Life & Death. This it is not. Rather, it is a set of vignettes about Mr. Shepard's life. The first is of his father having sex with an underage girl, she in the reverse cowgirl position making wild sounds while dad is laying taciturn. Mr. Shepard informs us that dad and teenager were oblivious to his entering their room and observing them up close and personal. I had expected something of value from Mr. Shepard. Alas, this book has zero value. It seems that Mr. Shepard's terminal disease warped not only his body, but his mind as well.