“Spy of the First Person,” published a few months after Shepard’s death, holds no answers, but reminds us why its creator was intent on seeking them all the same.
Sam Shepard once said,"I could go on and on about death. One of my favorite subjects — so long as you can keep it at arm’s length.", when at age 73 the renowned actor and playwright succumbed to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. His death took most people by surprise, for neither Shepard nor his family made his illness public.
Shepard led quite a life. The author of more than 55 plays, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Buried Child,” and an actor with roughly five dozen film roles to his credit -- one of which earned him an Oscar nod -- his place in our cultural firmament is secure. He was equally proud of his short stories, many of which appeared in The New Yorker, and were published in six previous collections.
The book opens on a recurring protagonist, a man with an unspecified illness affecting his motor skills that one can assume is drawn from the author’s experience. When we first meet him, he is confined in a wraparound screen porch and has difficulty recognizing his own family members. The similes give way quickly to the cold, hard facts of the case, when Shepard writes a few pages later about a series of tests he underwent at Mount Sinai.
The final page recounts a family dinner at a favorite Mexican restaurant. Shepard’s children and their friends, along with his sisters, are there, and he is in a wheelchair with a blanket over his legs. The place is jumping, life is going on all around him, yet he can’t shake the dual feeling of belonging both to this world and the next.
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