DAY OUT OF DAYS by Sam Shepard
Born an East Coaster, I’ve rarely been able to travel further west than my homeland of Maryland, which is to say, not very west at all. I’ve always wanted to road trip across the U.S. to see not just the best of the middle of America, but also the worst – the ghostly gas stops, barren lands and strange towns. The good, the bad, and the ugly, if you will, to quote the famous spaghetti western.
Day Out of Days is a loosely intertwined collection of short stories, poetry, and prose following the journeys of a few unnamed individuals across the dark and vast landscape of the great West. Some stories overlap, and some are simply snapshots of particularly grisly paths of thought. The tone is consistently bleak and forthright, but once you settle in it’s incredibly hard to look away. The end result isn’t a complete and logical narrative, but rather a collection of images – some surreal, some loosely sketched, and some aggressively graphic – that thread together to give a haunting vision of the grim underbelly of America.
Characters deal with the banality of the everyday and existence itself in sparse, cautiously selected prose. Somehow both timely and timeless, each section lends its own weight and importance to the novel, which culminates perfectly, if discordantly, in the very end.
One chapter in particular, “Should He Head North,” ends with a poem that just won’t leave me alone: “stay/and watch the next set of possibilities/arise/and fall away/what have you got to lose/but everything/piece by piece/everything/day by day”
Go west, young man (or woman), and curl up with any of these:
THE TORTILLA CURTAIN by T. Coraghessan Boyle
Boyle’s story is a provocative account of immigration that rings just as true today as it did in 1996. Fiction that feels more like non-fiction, characters are harrowing, genuine, and will stick with you long after you finish.
THE LAND OF LITTLE RAIN by Mary Austin
The Ansel Adams of the written word, Austin makes The Land of Little Rain a dense but quietly magnificent vision that’s worth the time needed to spend digesting it.
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN by Cormac McCarthy
What would this list be without a McCarthy novel? No Country for Old Men, appropriately and eloquently adapted by the Coen brothers in 2007, is horrifying and gratifying ride through the struggles that chance and opportunity play in everyone’s lives.
