At first glance, “Day Out of Days” seems like Sam Shepard (“Great Dream of Heaven,” “Cruising Paradise”) took notes during various road trips, threw them together and called it a book of short stories. There are short stories, journal entries, dialogues and what seems to be authorial thoughts that don’t seem related whatsoever. But as the book progresses the stories begin to play off each other and eventually fit into each other in precarious ways.
Unlike most short-story collections, “Day Out of Days” must be read front to back, and to the end, to fully understand the stories.
Shepard is the author of more than 45 plays, several of which received various awards (“Buried Child”). “Day Out of Days” is his third collection of short stories. He has also written two books of prose.
“Day Out of Days” starts with cynicism and numbness. The characters are all detached from their lives and a pervasive loneliness flutters through each story. Mostly the characters have a hard time dealing with the past and present. The incongruity between the two can be disturbing and seemingly unreal. The current self is so different from the past self that it feels odd to even cohabitate the same body.
One of the best stories has a man returning to his home town as a successful actor. He is confronted by a man who was his partner in crime as a teenager, stealing cars, chasing women and doing drugs.
The man tells the actor he looks like his friend from his younger days but the actor gives a false name and then sits listening to his sordid past from the guy.
Ironically, back then it is the famous actor who was the really awful one; the one who “couldn’t hold a thimbleful of whiskey without trying to rape everything in town.” Earlier, the actor was sizing the man up as a common criminal. He seems to have forgotten that part of himself.
In one story, a man doesn’t remember a woman he lived with several years prior. She sees him and recognizes him right off. When she describes their years together, he doesn’t remember. These kinds of moments happen throughout the book.
Nobody in the book seems to know why they do the things they are doing. They are drifting through their days and lives, sometimes jointly, such as the family on a winter vacation. They are so self-absorbed that the locale really makes no difference. They may as well be at home because the landscape doesn’t affect them.
Perhaps the most visual, or physical, case of detachedness is the story of a man who walks along a highway and comes across a severed head. The head with “no dangling arteries or purple mess” begs to be relocated to a lake not far from where they are. After some bickering and attitude – from the cleanly decapitated head – the man gives in, mostly to shut the head up.
There is a theme running through the book about beheadings. Sometimes they relate back to old Indian battles, sometimes murders.
In one entry, the author reflects about recent beheadings by terrorists, saying they are “the kind of separation that terrifies us the most – losing our heads. . ..The absolute shock of separation. . ..The body here, the head over there. And the mind desperately darting between them, trying to pull them together.” This idea, weaved in out of the stories, seems to transcend to the metaphysical as well.
There’s a line in one story that sums up the entire collection of stories, dialogues and notes: “The way people just keep living their lives because they don’t know what else to do.”
They are sad people. They don’t know it, of course, because they don’t even seem to know what is going on around them, let alone inside them. By the end, the book comes full circle and it all makes sense.
This is Shepard’s brilliance — the ability to continually surprise us. He plays with our heads, pushes boundaries, and in the end makes the journey worthwhile.
Renee Warner is a freelance writer in Basking Ridge, N.J.
FICTION
Day Out of Days
by Sam Shepard, $24.95.
