The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Great Dream of Heaven, by Sam Shepard
reviewed by Irving Malin

Sam Shepard. Great Dream of Heaven. Knopf, 2002. 142 pp. $20.00.

Although these startling stories demonstrate Shepard’s obsessive themes—the broken family, the search for salvation, the edge of hysteria—they should be read as innovative. Shepard is indeed a writer who can employ his talent in various genres. “The Remedy Man,” which introduces the collection, is told by a young narrator who is fascinated by a horse trainer. The trainer, unlike his own father, is able to do things properly—to fix chaos. There are parallel relationships—Shepard is always interested in duets of violence. (Look, for example, at True West, which details the “crossing” of brothers.) Although Shepard is at his best in his portrayal of the father-son relationships represented here, he is able to capture a strange, hysterical perspective, which changes suddenly in all of the stories: “I could see the horse’s eyeball roll back and catch me perched above him. I could see everything turned around, from his perspective.” “Blinking Eye” is another wonderful story. The woman, carrying her mother’s cremated ashes, tries to be careful while she drives toward her destination. Suddenly she sees a hawk diving down at her window: “The hawk suddenly goes completely berserk and busts out of its sweatshirt bondage, shrieking like a banshee.” The surrealistic turns and counterturns—again, swirling perspectives!—force us to accept that there is no stability of vision, no ordered reality. The driver, the hawk, the mother (in ashes), seem to merge so that it is impossible to see clearly. These lines convey the hysterical movement: “Her face is coated with ashes. She can feel them clinging to her lips as she runs her tongue across them. Her mother tastes like salt.” “Remedy Man” becomes horse becomes youthful narrator. Hawk and mother and daughter are thrust together. Is it any wonder that we are terrified by Shepard’s stories of explosive change?