Shepardized
The New Yorker and Zoetrope are up there among the most prestigious venues for short stories, and actor and writer Sam Shepard published something on both, a few weeks apart. So why not comment on both stories at once? I read “Land of the Living” first. The New Yorker has it on its website, here . It’s a simple enough story about a family (mother, father, two kids) from Minnesota that goes on vacation to Cancún. The tale looks pretty uneventful, stirred by funny dialogues and the typical stuff that goes awry on vacation, until, out of the blue, the wife asks her husband if he has a girlfriend. He denies it promptly, but he spends more time and energy remarking on how inappropriate it is to talk about this in front of the kids, and asking where she’s getting her ideas from. Your cell phone, she says when asked; a woman called. It could’ve been anyone, he protests. This is a first-person story, narrated by the husband, so we could’ve gotten a flat denial any time; we don’t. The s...