Day out of Days
Sam Shepard
304 pages,
hardcover: $24.95.
Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.
The short stories in Day out of Days, Sam Shepard’s new collection, have an unhinged, out-there appeal, reflecting their eclectic, mostly Western settings. Some individual stories are even named after their locations: “Williams, Arizona,” for one, and “Cracker Barrel Men’s Room (Highway 90 West).”
Shepard — yes, the Sam Shepard, the actor — is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of more than 45 plays and several story collections. Like some of his other work, Day out of Days captures seemingly ordinary experiences in cinematic detail.
In the opening story, “Kitchen,” for example, a man sits in his country kitchen with “no real visitors” to distract him from himself. In the stillness, he realizes that he’s alone in his “bunker … surrounded by mysterious stuff”: photographs tacked to the cupboards, postcards, carefully copied quotations. On the verge of a breakdown, he wonders: “Who scrambled all this stuff in here with no seeming regard for associative order, shape, or color? Without the slightest care for where it might end up.”
He decides that the remedy is to take a walk into “the dripping black woods,” as if any break from the monotony will set him straight. His confusion about what’s become of his life is one of the themes of this collection — people leaving their comfort zones to see the world for what it really is. Day out of Days captures this spirit in a surprising mix of short stories, dialogues and lyrics that sometimes show little regard for associative order themselves.
Highlighting the more surreal — and unfriendly — aspects of existence, a decapitated talking head surfaces in several of the book’s stories. Elsewhere, a narrator plagued by his own incessant chatter, a man trapped overnight in a restaurant men’s room, and a father vacationing in Cancun guide us through the peculiarities of their lives. With its quick shifts in perspective and place, Day out of Days adds up to a bizarre journey, but its frenzied style mirrors the darkly comic and disjointed nature of lives that, in the end, may differ little from our own.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A dark and disjointed journey.
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