Day out of Days: Stories
Day out of Days forms a pastiche of the cinematic cowboy at twilight
Reviewed by Cindy Widner, Fri., Jan. 15, 2010
Day out of Days: Stories
by Sam ShepardKnopf, 304 pp., $25.95
There's a decapitated head rolling around these stories. Let's just start with that. It's an easy symbol – doesn't try not to be, really – of a writer's relentless monologuing, of the body's demise, and maybe of other things. It chatters and muses and manipulates some poor guy who finds it on the side of the road. The head reappears from time to time, as do other characters and storylines, as Shepard's stories careen about the West, Midwest, South, and, occasionally, Mexico; "the Road is not a Movie," says one narrator in classic denial, but it may well be a story-making pinball machine. Shepard is a man of his Kerouac-drunk time and hardly the first or last to idealize the open road, the cowboy, and the reckless, almost amoral qualities of the American spirit, but he's one of the remaining few actually born to it.
Perhaps unintentionally, Day out of Days drains any romanticism that may be left in that tired, womanless mythology. Its best stories rub irritably against the twin deflations of age and the 21st century: A family's Cancún vacation suffers under marital suspicions; a man chases memory in a hotel on the outskirts of Indianapolis, with an endless true-crime show looping in the background; Fats Domino's rescue from Katrina's floods is retold by an airline passenger, maybe as complete fiction; a man with a bad heart counts his pills and takes to vigorous, solo snowshoeing in defiance of mortality. Snippets of historical interjection – tales of Howlin' Wolf, Sacajawea, Casey Jones, Carrie Nation, Man o' War, Eric Dolphy – deepen both the context and the loneliness at the book's core, and while Shepard occasionally falters with underwritten poetry or clichéd scenes of macho brooding, the book's meditative patchwork encourages us to forget the lapses.
Day out of Days forms a pastiche of the cinematic cowboy at twilight, a thinker and drinker whose sadness and self-mockery and dismay save him from the preening self-importance that afflicts many of his peers; he's left knocking about eternally, like one of Dante's sinners, driving because he doesn't know what else to do. Maybe it's a country for old men after all.