“You can’t go home again.” Thomas Wolfe’s famous phrase has long served as a dictum for writers and analysands, but it needs an addendum: You can’t stop trying. Sam Shepard has acknowledged the compulsion — and also the futility — in interviews and dramatized it in plays where protagonists return to the place that’s supposed to take you in, but doesn’t. They come home not for comfort but to settle scores, demand respect, even elicit an acknowledgment of their existence. Family members in extremis shout and holler, hoping, like the father in “Buried Child,” that the sounds they make will signal an affirmative reply to the question, “Are we still in the land of the living?”
This question floats over Shepard’s novella of short-burst imaginings and conversations with himself, as the aging narrator ruefully takes stock. He’s in the land of the living, but only just, hanging on by his fingernails, his memory, his imagination, his never-ending obsession with his father, his blue thermal socks (nicked from a movie set) and his ongoing arguments with women, including a sometime-girlfriend 50 years his junior. She’s called the Blackmail Girl because she’s recording their conversations for a book that will launch her literary career. Maybe. There’s a wry poetic justice in the spectacle of a writer, that scavenger of others’ lives, helplessly furnishing material for another. The voyeur voyeured.
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