Rose, an orphan and adopted by a caring family, worships Lana and fights for her friendship, while Lana, the daughter of an egotistical Berkeley professor who, for most of the book, sits in a prison cell awaiting execution for the murder of his wife, fights against her father’s horrible legacy. The girls’ sense of entitlement, their aura of invincibility, is hedonistic, egotistical, and ultimately harmless, but their friendship, stretched over time until it reaches a breaking point as adults, leaves lasting scars.

Lana’s mother is also an academic, writing treatises on “fraught mother-daughter relations” with titles such as “The Corset of Anxiety.” But Lana’s father, Vic Mahler, is the star of the family. “Starting in 1960,” Meidav writes, “Vic Mahler had written about neuroethology and the bioethics of possibility within the brain in such a visionary way that a whole generation woke to feverish new thoughts about the mind and perception, a generation happy to scramble his message into acts undertaken on behalf of their own drive toward free love and pharmacology.” These followers, called “shaggies,” appreciate his ideas about choice, and shadow Mahler and his family throughout Berkeley and the course of the novel.

Meidav’s ideas are as deep and twisted as her dense, teaming prose.  Throughout her story of Vic, Rose, and Lana, Meidav explores the concepts of choice, time, and the irresistible moment experienced by young people when they realize they are standing on the threshold of great action. This moment, this overwhelming sense of possibility, is embodied by the physicality and friendship of Lana and Rose, which Meidav captures beautifully. She describes Lana as “a tawny jungle cat in cowboy boots, a shaft of effortless cool around her, eyes hazel and obscenely glamorous.“ And she describes Rose as a “mesmerized chameleon, hard to place, flip-flopping along with them, never quite on the group.” Meidav catches the ecstatic moment when, as teenagers on the cusp of womanhood, they break into an impromptu dance: “You cannot do the dance alone, you do it with a friend, your flesh almost commingled in order to surrender control. If a person could x-ray the thought about the dance, the hope for early death or glory would be clear while below the two girls stay teenage fish indefinitely, blind and riding currents that say all will be smooth, sweet, a fantasy of selfhood.”

The fantasy of selfhood does not survive their growth into damaged adult selves. Vic’s murder of Lana’s mother disrupts their relationship, and Lana and Rose do not see each other again for almost 20 years until, on the eve of Vic’s execution, they meet on the grounds of a Central California health spa and nudist colony. Notwithstanding a brief sojourn in New York City, Meidav’s story is set in California, in Berkeley and Los Angeles (or “Ellay” as Rose calls it), from sun-baked pot farms in the hills of Northern California to the Central California prison where Vic waits out his remaining days.

The magic of possibility, embodied in the magical bond between the two girls, seems in Meidav’s writing also to become a metaphor for the idea of California itself. As with most of the ideas in Meidav’s book, she seems to offer space for alternative, darker interpretations. Lola, California is ripe with dualities: possibility verses action taken, potential verses failure, choice verses fate, memory verses forgetfulness. All of these concepts seem to wash over the girls as they navigate their lives and locales. When Rose spends time in Los Angeles, “she will find it useless to seek people who are unplastic, since the plastic aspect of Ellay is universal, buffering its citizens from awareness of failure, failure here meaning one gets washing out to sea on a wave of mortality or, worse, public apathy and forgetfulness.”

Meidav also explores time’s impact, through her insistent present-tense prose to her somewhat disorienting time-stamp chapter headings, which range from exact moments (“Fifteenth of December, 2008, 5:01 P.M.”) to blendings of months, years, and eras (“1976-1980 Sundays”). Time’s tyranny, and the shift to an adult’s world of deadlines, is most poignantly evoked in Vic’s death row countdown. If Lana and Rose cannot escape adulthood, Vic certainly cannot escape his literal prison and his scheduled sentence.

Vic’s ideas about freedom of choice come to a horrible conclusion when he murders his wife, a premeditated act that sends him to death row and almost severs the girls’ friendship forever. Lana and Rose are forced to orient all their current choices, as wives, mothers, and lovers, around the legacy of that choice. And as friends, they remember in their younger selves the irresistible idea of potential, of pre-choice, embodied in the myth of California and the image of two young girls dancing together, oblivious to their power but with a vague understanding of its magic nonetheless.

Lana seems to gain a final understanding of the magic she shared with Rose, when, as an adult at the spa, she spots two girls sunbathing. “The girls find each other, soak up sun in parallel, make others’ suffering disposable, create an opalescent fizz around: the world is unknown so they flip-flop the important and secure solace, good at drawing the magic circle around themselves. As reward for their labors, they get to enjoy the unguarded hedonism of melting together, the pure prolepsis of sunbathing on concrete.” It’s a lovely image, which Lana knows cannot last. Time carries her forward, past the magic of her girlhood with her best friend, Rose, past the legacy left to her by her egotistical, damaged father, past the idea of California itself, and into her own choices, and real life, and the future.

Wiig loves to riff. There are a few great extended gags which she generously shares with Maya Rudolph, playing Lillian, her best friend and the bride-to-be, and Chris O’Dowd, playing Officer Rhodes, her Highway Patrolman love interest. They spin jokes and variations of jokes off one idea, effortlessly and usually, to my chagrin given the boisterous women behind me in the movie theater, hilariously. Wiig is naturally goofy, as she has shown in the smaller roles she’s had in movies such as Adventureland and Ghost Town. It’s great to see her comic sensibilities fill the screen as she improvises and invents new comic variations on sometimes crass movie gags. Her routines with Maya Rudolph, especially, are both funny and warm. They illustrate the interesting, wonderful, and unique relationship shared by these funny characters. Their scenes work as crass movie comedy and also as examples of two friends who enjoy being crass and have fun grossing themselves out.

But there could have been less of this. The riffs go one usually just one joke too far, and the movie, at just over two hours, seems overlong. It also seems underdeveloped. Though it’s called Bridesmaids, it focuses on just one, and there definitely could have been more of the others, who are introduced so nicely and played so fully by the other actresses in the cast: Melissa McCarthy as Megan, the socially inept, gross one; Ellie Kemper as Becca, the innocent one; Wendi McLendon-Covey as Rita, the harried housewife; and especially Rose Byrne as Helen, Annie’s nemesis and Lillian’s new best friend. We only get glimpses of these characters, but each is played so expertly and the glimpses are so accurate that we want more. Only Melissa McCarthy is given the time and material to break out of the pack and go someplace new. The others are left as types, straining at the limits of their character arcs. This is especially unfortunate for Byrne, whose character seems to have particular potential to become something greater than just Annie’s nemesis and a stereotypical uptight rich control freak.

The movie feels a little too reliant on the standard good-time comedy movie formula: it all turns out well in the end for Annie and Lillian more because it has to than because the characters reconcile with each other or learn something about themselves. Or more accurately, the characters learn something and do something that makes the movie end happily because they live on a comedy movie planet and the there gravity compels them to. That didn’t seem to bother the women behind me, or the rest of the audience in the theater, who laughed and whooped and snorted with abandon. It also didn’t seem to bother me too much. The movie was very funny, and hid its deeper, more sentimental side underneath an onslaught of jokes and inspired riffs. Sort of like Annie herself.

It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that Rebus’s leaving seems similar in spirit and impact to Holmes and Moriarty’s plunge off Reichenbach Falls, and even Ahab and the white whale’s final deadly dance. That it’s surprising given the elegiac lead-up through most of the novel’s 600 pages is a testament to Rankin’s skill as a novelist, his love of his character, and DI Rebus’s innate unpredictability. Some would say orneriness. Rebus cannot seem to stay safely inside his box, even after 18 novels, beginning with Knots and Crosses in 1987 and ending with Exit Music, published last year and recently released in paperback.

Frankenstein’s Monster is made up of pieces of Frankenstein’s long-lost half-brother, Toby.

Oedipus kills his father and plays golf with his mother.

Babe the Talking Pig is not a real pig.

Hamlet’s step-father killed his father and married a nice girl from New Jersey.

Anna Karenina caught a later train.

Dewey defeated Truman.

Upon closer inspection, Moby Dick is revealed to be a kind of taupe.

I think that’s what James Wood’s library must be like. Though he says, in How Fiction Works, that he didn’t look further than the books he had at hand to help him write his examination of literary techniques in the novel, implying that it’s not beyond the layman to assemble a comparable collection of classics, Wood’s modest bookshelf must be touched with magic because its seem to encompass the entire history of literature, from the King James Bible and Shakespeare to all of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Conrad and Crane, Kafka, Dickens, David Foster Wallace, Pynchon, and Updike up to his 2006 effort, “The Terrorist.” I know this not because I kept a running tally. Wood, who wears his erudition lightly, did it for me in a helpful bibliography at the end of the book.

And now comes a new collection of essays, or rather, a reprint of a book originally published in 2000, The Broken Estate, which seems to contain, written between the lines of the various book reviews and essays, Wood’s early thoughts on the techniques that writers use to hold together “artifice and verisimilitude,” the themes he would later bring into sharp focus in How Fiction Works.

The Broken Estate looks at how novelists learned to reproduce reality in the context of the 19th century’s parallel trends of reading the Bible as a literary work and novels as semi-religious acts of creation. “I think that distinctions between literary belief and religious belief are important, and I am drawn to writers who struggle with them,” Wood says in his introductory essay. He goes on to write, “Around the middle of the nineteenth century, those distinctions became harder to maintain, and we have lived in the shadow of their blurring ever since. This is when the old estate broke. I would define the old estate as the supposition that religion was a set of divine truth-claims, and that the Gospel narratives were supernatural reports; fiction might be supernatural too, but fiction  was always fictional, it was not in the same order of truth as the Gospel narratives. During the 19th century these two positions began to soften and merge. At the high point of the novel’s rise, the Gospel began to be read, by both writers and theologians, as a set of fictional tales—a kind of novel. Simultaneously, fiction became an almost religious activity (though not of course with religion’s former truth-value, for this was no longer quite believed in).”

Wood slams the 19th century critics who cut the Gospels down to size, while at the same time exploring writers who struggled mightily with their own acts of literary creation. It was a fight with God, over God, for God, by writers who produced, created out of nothing, simulacrums of real life. Wood writes perceptively, movingly about the lives and works of such diverse authors as Herman Melville, Anton Chekhov, and Knut Hamsun, and the essays on these three writers seem to touch an emotional core of this book.

Melville, perhaps one of the most religious American writers, was obsessed by the silence of God in the world, and turned to metaphor to help explain it. “I think that language and metaphor were a great torture as well as a great joy to Melville,” Wood writes. Melville came to understand that “language does not help us explain or describe God. Quite the contrary, it registers simply our inability to describe God; it holds our torment. Yet language is all there is, and thus Melville follows it as Ahab follows the whale, to the very end.” Wood seems to appreciate, to feel instinctively, the obsessive need that went into the creation of Melville’s heroic metaphors. They created a new path to reality in fiction, while simultaneously registering for Melville the personal unreality of God in the world.

In a later essay, Wood compares Thomas Pynchon to Melville unfavorably, to say the least. “Melville used allegory to hunt down truth, and in doing so he exploded allegory into a thousand pieces. Pynchon uses allegory to hide truth, and in doing so expands allegory into a fetish of itself. Melville raced with the danger of nothingness while running after truth. Nothingness was a wound in truth’s side.”

In other essays, Wood reinterprets Shakespeare’s life-defining soliloquies, rehabilitates D. H. Lawrence’s stylistic beauty, praises W. G. Sebald’s indecipherable facts, and savages John Updike’s lazy lyricism. Writing about Updike’s 1996 novel, In the Beauty of the Lilies, Wood states, “Part of the difficulty here is Updike’s tranquil aestheticism, which so swells the textures of his books that it is hard for the reader to imagine any of Updike’s characters feeling metaphysically abandoned.” Wood believes that Updike’s prose often works against the development of truthful characters, because the prose drowns out any of the characters true thoughts with Updike’s own. “Updike cannot relinquish, he must reinsert himself.” “Essie is unable to imagine an alternative because Updike is unable to picture a reality more powerful than his own.” Wood is an excellent close reader, and in analyzing Updike’s abundant prose displays a remarkably acute ear, or eye, I should say.

When writing about Virginia Woolf, he talks about metaphor and criticism: “All criticism is itself metaphorical in movement, because it deals in likeness. It asks: what is art like? What does it resemble? How can it best be described, or redescribed? If the artwork describes itself, then criticism’s purpose is to redescribe the artwork in its own, different language.” Wood’s book, and his thoughts on writers, is full of wonderful, metaphorical, critical one-liners. Of Chekhov: “…watching a Chekhov character is like watching a lover wake up in bed, half awake and half dreaming, saying something odd and private which means nothing to us because it refers to the preceding dream.” On George Steiner: “He approaches each work as if leading a coup to restore a monarch to the throne.” Of Iris Murdoch’s love for Tolstoy and Shakespeare: “Murdoch returns fondly to these two, like someone returning to the city of her honeymoon.” And, on Anthony Julius’s  book on T. S. Eliot: “He has written an unstable book about an unstable subject; reading it is like watching a maniac trying to calm a hysteric.”

I imagine Wood would be happy to read these lines in a contemporary novel, and they certainly make his points come alive. It’s interesting to read these essays because though they address writing and religion, they explore many of the ideas he would explore and codify about eight years later in How Fiction Works.

Told by over a hundred voices, including actors, directors, theatre administrators, critics, writers, New York politicians, and Papp himself, the book presents an often vibrant, sometimes cacophonous mosaic of New York theater history from the 1950s through the 70s, as Papp grew up and molded the New York Shakespeare Festival into an irresistible cultural force, and his own legend into something more elusive.

It makes sense that a book composed of many voices would offer many stories. There’s the biography of Papp himself, born poor in New York and almost heroically possessed of self-confidence, drive, and a genius to organize. There are fascinating glimpses of New York’s cultural history during the second half of the 20th century, as Papp crosses paths with many of the city’s most powerful citizens, including a fascinating standoff with the almost royally powerful Robert Moses. And there’s the history of American theater, as Papp bends the path of theater towards himself and his stages, first through free Shakespeare in Central Park and then by the significant plays her premiered and playwrights he championed at the Public Theater. You cannot write the history of American theater without devoting a major portion of the story to Joseph Papp. This book provides wonderful source material, but does not tell the full or completely satisfying story itself.

Part of the problem lies with its form. Without commentary, it can be hard to decipher a central narrative from the hundreds of speakers and thousands of conversations which make up this exhaustive oral history. The book works best when Papp speaks and tells his own story. He’s a carnival huckster, a brash kid who made it big in the big city, and he never lost his street-kid persona. Papp is egotistical, funny, passionate, intellectual, and sometimes mean. When many players comment on a single event, we get overlapping and contradictory impressions, such as when CBS cancelled its contract to air the Public Theater’s uncomfortable dramas, or when Papp hustled to raise funds to build the Delacorte or refurbish the Public. He’s self-mythologizing man, and almost had to be to accomplish what he did, but that does not lend itself to a comprehensive history, even when balanced out by other voices’ more objective assessments.

Turan segments Papp’s story into three acts. Act One covers the formative years, as Papp escapes an impoverished boyhood, discovers his love of theater and Shakespeare, develops his mastery of producing, and fulfills the dream to bring Shakespeare to the masses. We hear about the boy who earns pennies plucking chickens, the chief petty officer in the Navy who puts on shows, the actor in Los Angeles who sweeps up the theatre, and the brash impresario in New York who hustles venues, actors, directors, and politicians to successfully mount Shakespeare’s plays first in a frigid theater in the East Village and then later in the East River Park Amphitheatre. This part of the story ends with Papp building the Delacorte and successfully battling Robert Moses to keep the productions free.

Act Two details the productions of seminal plays and includes fascinating backstage stories about the creation of the Pulitzer-prize winners No Place to Be Somebody, That Championship Season, and Short Eyes. There are amazing vignettes with George C. Scott and Colleen Dewhurst, Jerry Stiller and Roscoe Lee Browne. We see Papp’s complex relationship with David Rabe, who seems to be to the Public what Clifford Odets was to The Group Theater. As Papp says,  “Once I got into one of David’s works, it stuck to me like the most important thing in my life. I because so connected with his plays that I felt that I would protect them from anything. I’d say my connection with David was the strongest connection I’ve had with a writer in the theater’s history. And I think he’s the greatest writer we’ve produced. His talent is yet to be recognized.” Mike Nichols, who directed Rabe’s Streamers, adds, “He is a passionate, engaged man, and he and Joe have something similar that’s very rare in the theater, a powerful moral sense.” This part of the story ends when Papp and the Public conquer Broadway, first with the production of Two Gentlemen of Verona, and then with A Chorus Line. Bernard Gersten, Papp’s loyal colleague, says, of Verona, “It signaled a change in the theater: suddenly the not-for-profit theaters that were growing in sophistication and capability began to feed Broadway.”

The third act seems to follow Papp’s fall, or at least his semi-uncomfortable stasis at the top of the New York, and the U.S., theater world. Several fascinating relationships are only partly explored, such as Papp’s connection with Michael Bennett, the director and choreographer of A Chorus Line. And there’s the sad story of Papp’s sacking of Gersten, which could have benefited from more exploration. Perhaps the downside of Papp’s own involvement in the book is that we never see Papp as a fully-rounded individual. We learn almost nothing of his personal life. This produces some surprising moments, such as when his first wife is covered by an aside. If we don’t completely know the man, we cannot completely understand the personal reasons that may have influenced his producing decisions. Tell us more about his relationship with Rabe, and Bennett and Miguel Pinero who wrote Short Eyes. Why did he fire Gerstein after decades on the job? What really drove him to climb to the top of the social spectrum of moneyed New York? The book cannot tell us, because it lacks authorial insights into the man and doesn’t have the means, as an oral history, to editorialize.

What it can tell us, and tells us most successfully, are stories of Shakespeare in America, and the American theater, during this particularly dynamic period. Papp’s productions did not revolutionize acting Shakespeare, but they did create an environment that seemed to capture a certain rawness and explosiveness which had been missing from productions in the recent past. Papp’s genius was to stage the plays out doors and to keep them free. As a result, they seemed to connect directly to a popular aesthetic. Papp returned Shakespeare to the realm of mass entertainment. This was true from the first production of Julius Caesar at the East River Park Amphitheater in the early 60s. Says Papp, “A lot of elderly Jewish people came from those [low-cost housing developments], and during the course of the play you’d hear all these comments similar to what used to go on in the Yiddish theater. They’d yell to Caesar, “Watch out, he’s killing you!’ and ‘Oh, it’s a shame!’ They would comment on it because they felt this was actually happening.” Adds Colleen Dewhurst, “No critic told them it was good or bad, they were just reacting on a summer night to what was happening. I realized that theater is not an elitist art. Theater is for the people. I could have gone through a whole career not having had that kind of experience. I thought, finally, ‘This must be the way Shakespeare really was.’”

James Earl Jones, who was in Gladys Vaughan’s production of Othello in 1964, spoke about Vaughan’s direction and the direction American Shakespearean acting was to take. “She had a great sense of what passion was about. She never settled for emotion, she said, ‘Let’s elevate it to passion.’ Especially out of doors, emotion can often be indulgent on the stage and never reach the audience. It you’re crying, no one can see that past a few feet. She wanted that emotion elevated so that it would affect your voice and your body, so that it would project as also be of a size fitting to Shakespeare.”

It’s this largeness, plus the egalitarian nature of the enterprise, which seems to define Shakespeare productions under Papp. Gerald Freedman, a director, sums it up. “Over the next several years, the style of Shakespeare that we did in the park really changed the way Shakespeare is perceived and performed in this country. We combined the Method and the word. We used thee personality of the actor, the inner life of the actor, to invigorate the language. When there was a compromise to be made between an actor who had some balls and an actor who had technique, we’d go for the actor who had balls. I didn’t think we did it because it suited the park, but it did suit the park because playing outdoors to an audience that represented all areas of the city demanded energy and invigoration.”

The book captures the energy of this new artistic enterprise. It follows the flowering of an age of free Shakespeare in Central Park, the birth of a new generation of actors including George C. Scott, Dewhurst, Charles Durning, and many, many others, and the growth of new American plays that challenged convention and shook up Broadway. If it lacks momentum, and seems to drag on as it recounts one production after another, it gains energy from the audiences who crowded the park, and the voice of the man behind it all, driven, intimate, insistent, and outrageous, a showman for Shakespeare and himself.

After insulting the daughter of one such donor, Milo is summarily fired, only to be rehired with a catch: a new donor will carry through on a potentially huge gift only if Milo handles the transaction. The donor, Purdy, is an old college classmate of Milo’s, and  before the gift is offered, Milo must help Purdy contain his son, Don Charboneau, a disabled Iraqi war veteran who’s suddenly reappeared in Purdy’s life. Milo somehow needs to neutralize the angry young man and close the donation while maintaining his crumbling marriage, parenting his own three-year old son, and inhabiting the nebulous identity of grown child to his newly widowed mother, now happily ensconced in a vibrant lesbian relationship.

It’s a difficult act, demanding an accomplished actor, and Milo isn’t right for the part. He is too self-conscious, too verbal, and too tightly wound to accept the constraints put on him. He tries, and his valiant efforts and heroic failures offer Lipsyte the chance to embark on epic riffs on various themes, such as the absurdity of corporate life, the loss of childhood potential, and midtown buffet lunches: “The schizophrenic glee with which you could load your plastic shell with spinach salad, pork fried rice, turkey with cranberry, chicken with pesto, curried yams, clams casino, bread sticks, ad yogurt, pay for it by the pound, this farm feed for human animals in back pantsuits and pleated chinos, animals whose enclosure included the entire island of Manhattan, this sensation I treasured deeply, greasily. Executive officers, up since dawn for their Ashtanga sessions might pay for pricier, socially conscious salads at the vegan buffets, but this was where the action was, and I, who should have been Tupperwaring couscous from Queens, who could just barely afford this go-goo for the regular folk, these lumpy lumpen lunches, reveled in them, or at least the idea of them.”

Milo is acutely aware that the numbing work in the development office has bored the life out of his own artistic potential. He’s not pompous, however; he’s too smart to be completely enamored of his own younger self, and occasionally his self-awareness borders on self-loathing: “I’d become one of those mistakes you sometimes find in an office, a not unpleasant but mostly unproductive presence bobbing along on the energy tides of others, a walking reminder of somebody’s error in judgment.” Some of the book’s funniest moments come when Milo rails against his work in the development office. “Llewellyn and Vargina sat across the table. We took turns popping the tops of our sodas, listened to the sound reverberate in the wood-paneled room. The word ‘reverberate’ reverberated in my mind, which I could now picture as a wood-paneled room.”

These epic riffs and one-liners, coming from Milo’s own semi-bemused, sometimes tortured consciousness, gives the book it’s heart. They could overwhelm the story, but here Lipsyte keeps plot complications moving forward at an impressive pace. Charboneau, as expected, is difficult to contain, but no moreso than his father, prone to late night candy-induced jags. Milo’s wife seems to be having an affair, and his son is without daycare once the preschool he’s been attending temporarily closes for “pedagogical conflicts,” but Milo doggedly pursues “the Give.”

Milo cannot help but compare himself to Purdy, the online music maven who threatens to give a tremendous amount of money to Milo’s employer. Purdy and Milo were college acquaintances, colleagues, friends? Purdy personifies the emptiness Milo feels when he looks at the adult he’s become, but he needs him to keep his job, his self-esteem, his marriage, perhaps his entire life. Purdy “was somehow both of us and beyond us. He did not need to be anointed, ordained. He had powers of cajolement, a gentle, quasi-Christ-y authority. Maybe he just knew how we’d all turn out. He would guard our spasms of shame, of ego, from the others, wait with patience, forgiveness, for us to slip free of our charades, embrace our destinies, as bond lawyers, dental surgeons, new media consultants, housewives, househusbands, or unemployed development officers. Then he would stand there in his beautiful truth, the truth of money.”

Milo attempts to follow the rules inherent in Purdy’s world, the world of all that money, and believe in the truth that he represents. But in trying to tame the unruly impulses of Purdy’s illegitimate son, land the donation, save his marriage, and accept Purdy’s world-view, it’s not surprising that Milo snaps. The pressure becomes too much. Remembering Schopenhauer from college, Milo realizes, “It was foolish to want. You would never get what you wanted. Even if you got what you wanted you would never get what you wanted. It was better to strip yourself of the wanting. But this was impossible. So you suffered. Your raw eyeballs suffered.” Until Milo learns not to ask, and just to be, he must suffer.

The surprising thing is that Milo does not become an unredeemable miserablist as his direction suggests. It’s the ultimate joy of Lipsyte’s book that Milo resurfaces after his break a happy man. He loves his son. He loves abundance. He even loves, or at least likes, himself. Milo takes responsibility for his marriage and for whom he’s become. In the tug between wanting and getting, who you were and who you are, Milo grows up.

Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

The thing I forget about Pynchon, as his gorgeous sentences and paragraphs pile up in his 700- and 800-page books, is that he writes such gorgeous sentences and paragraphs. And that he’s funny. This book has some of the most heartbreaking scenes I’ve ever read, and also some of the funniest. I’m thinking of “The Disgusting English Candy Drill,” which had me spitting up my camphor-flavored nougat in delight. For all its paranoid intensity, it’s grounded in achingly beautiful prose. It’s good to have Pynchon in the world.

Light in August by William Faulkner

The book that introduced me to Faulkner and his boiling, roiling sentences that seem to wander off the trail and disappear over the next ridge until they discover a clear spring or smoldering fire. “I’ve come a fur piece,” it begins, and the indomitable spirit of the young woman, as she walks from Alabama to find her lover, is matched by Faulkner’s own expeditions into the tortured history of his characters lives, and America’s divided heart, often as twisted and baroque and revelatory as the sentences he employs to describe them.

The Black Dahlia by James Ellroy

Just fun, in an ultra-violent, obsessive, crimeshow sort of way. Not just one main character but two hunt down the sadistic Black Dahlia killer, both haunted by demons and both with similar names. In this book, published in 1987, Ellroy seems poised to take the journey to narrative fragmentation he arrived at with his Underworld U.S.A. trilogy. Here there’s real narration, scene-setting, transitions, all the novelistic things you might expect. But Ellroy also goes deeper than normal noir, and abandons himself to the dark heart of crime and guilt in Los Angeles in the ‘40s.

Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

Hammett’s mystery story is airtight and circled by stylistic, unrepentant, pitiless violence as if by vultures descending on a bullet-riddled corpse left in a ditch in the desert. I don’t know how I would have reacted if I read the novel when it was first published in 1929, but it’s laconic, tight-lipped rock-steady posture, the moral backbone of the Continental Op, seemed wise to me circa 1975.

Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill

An American tragedy written originally for an audience of one. The betrayal that it ever saw the light of day, O’Neill’s wishes thwarted by his wife who went on to publish the play, is overshadowed by the betrayal of O’Neill by his father, who blamed him, his existence, for his mother’s drug addition. One betrayal led to a damaged child who became an amazing dramatist. The other betrayal brought the world perhaps his greatest drama.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe? by Edward Albee

I heard this first, as a kid, on record, in a complete recording of the original Broadway production, with Arthur Hill, Uta Hagen, George Grizzard, and Melinda Dillon. Though it certainly isn’t a chamber piece, hearing it first without any visuals seemed to heighten the drama and amplify Albee’s archly intellectual, merrily vicious power.

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

Whether airbrushing dead communists out of propaganda photographs, having tantric sex with headless partners, or ascending to heaven while dancing in a circle, Kundera’s reality is delicate and deadly, ephemeral and everlasting. It’s the simplicity, an intellectual distancing coupled with the sense that a totalitarian state is crouching outside the house, just waiting to blow the door down, that gives the book such urgent grace.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

I know that editor Gordon Lish drastically revised the stories in this collection, but when they were originally published it was absolutely thrilling to read something so new. Carver’s stories were unlike anything else, yet his people and prose and point of view, once expressed, seemed to be everywhere. Heartbreak occurred in what wasn’t said. Absurdity sat like living room furniture on the front lawn. The style was christened minimal in the sense that a drop of sea water contains all the oceans in the world.

American Buffalo by David Mamet

“Fuckin’ Ruthie, fuckin’ Ruthie, fuckin’ Ruthie, fuckin’ Ruthie, fuckin’ Ruthie!” Dialogue stretched to absurdity by the rhythms of Mamet’s characters’ macho posturing. Or is it Mamet’s own tough-guy cluelessness (which in recent days seems to have slightly calcified)? Now his tough guys know more than you, but that wasn’t always the case. When it was first produced in 1975, the three cohorts scheming to steal a valuable coin were lost nobodies trying to be bigger than they were, using language as their weapon, their adornment, and their shield.

Krapp’s Last Tape by Samuel Beckett

The simplicity leaves me breathless. A man listens to tapes of his younger self and hears how he failed his life. His current hovel-like existence only seems to throw grander light on the 39-year old optimist in the world who recorded those proud utterances almost a lifetime ago.  Lauding Beckett seems like a cliché now since he’s recognized as the writer of the epoch, the age, his age, but if you listen closely you can hear the cold air of desolation still rushing between the spaces in his words.

Other books of course include Anagrams, which knocked me out, The Great Gatsby, Travesties, Angle of Repose, The Remains of the Day, The Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and gosh, now I’m just listing works that are great but did not necessarily influence me in a life-changing sort of way yet nonetheless remain touchstones so far in my world.

The play is really about damage that goes forward and backwards, parents hurting their kids and kids hurting their parents, a potent legacy that sometimes skips generations and definitely crosses state lines.

At the beginning of the play, Jake, played by Alessandro Nivola, on the phone with his brother, Frankie, played by Josh Hamilton, believes he’s beaten his wife to death in a jealous rage. It’s Shepard’s sly initial joke that both the rage and the results are wrong. Jake thought his wife, Beth, played by Marin Ireland, was cheating when she was only rehearsing a play. He confused her dressing up for a part with the real thing. And he didn’t kill her but instead beat her so severely that when she first appears she can barely walk or talk. She spends the rest of the play slowly healing from her injuries but never fully recovers. No one in the play does.

Jake lands back with his mother, Lorraine, played by Karen Young, while his sister, Sally, played by Maggie Siff, and Frankie, quickly exit the scene. Jake, incapacitated by sudden guilty rages and blinding headaches, slowly deteriorates, while across the stage, Beth beings to regain her ability to communicate. Helped by her brother Mike, played by Frank Whaley, she moves back with her parents, Baylor and Meg, played by Keith Carradine and Laurie Metcalf. Both families attempt to heal sick children, while processing older wounds inflicted on them by siblings and parents, husbands and wives, both absent and present.

The initial impact of these wounds seems to be forgetfulness, a sort of localized amnesia which blots out incidents, people, entire family trees. Both mothers forget that their children are married. Jake forgets how his father died; indeed, he forgets his own integral part in the accident that killed him. Jake also forgets that he once lived in his childhood bedroom. Meg forgets how her mother died. It’s a surreal bent which fits snugly into Hawke’s fluid, dreamy staging. Scenes flow into one another, and though each family generally inhabits one area of the stage, they occasionally look longingly at the other, remembering or imagining the people they’ve left behind. The production is also graced by the live music accompaniment of the duo, Gaines, and the tremendous set design, by Derek McLane, that surrounds the characters with walls of cast-off furniture and transforms the proscenium into what looks like a Cornell boxed collage.

Shepard characters don’t dwell for long in the production’s surreal landscape. They’re too busy skinning deer, knocking snow off their boots, rubbing mink oil into their cracked feet, or shooting each other or getting shot, to spend too much time acting on thematic concerns. The revival, which opened in New York in a limited engagement that runs through March 20th, was originally produced in 1985, six years after Shepard’s Buried Child won the Pulitzer Prize (and which, in my mind, joins Long Day’s Journey Into Night and last year’s August: Osage County in the ranks of great American family dramas.) It continued Shepard’s focus on the collision between violence and the American dream, the promise of the new cut down by the bitterness of the past. Shepard talked about this in a recent interview he gave to The New York Times: “There’s no way to escape the fact that we’ve grown up in a violent culture. We just can’t get away from it, it’s part of our heritage. I think part of it is that we’ve always felt somewhat helpless in the face of this vast continent. Helplessness is answered in many ways, but one of them is violence.”

Violence dominates and obliterates. Jake is felled by his violent attack on Beth just as surely as Beth is, and one of the most interesting things about the production is how Nivola suffers and succumbs to his outbursts while Ireland begins to walk and talk again. The collision of violence and the American family is brought to life when Mike appears, near the end of the play, with Jake’s American flag wrapped around his hunting rifle. (The presence of the flag also gives rise to what I think is the production’s lone awkward symbolic moment.)

Violence is also welded to the idea of love, which either appears volcanically, as in Jake’s passionate rages, or incoherently, as in Beth’s halting attempts to express herself. She never stops loving Jake, and her love for him seems to become more pure when it’s filtered through her fractured speech. Her damaged mind creates her own poetry, especially in the gorgeous, heartbreaking lines which close the first act: “I know—love. I know what love is. I can never forget. That. Never.”

The pull between the love of family, wives, husbands, children, and the lure to destroy and obliterate the same is embodied most wholeheartedly in the character of Lorraine, Jake, Mike, and Sally’s mother. She apologizes for Jake’s beating by blaming Beth, the victim. “He wasn’t fit to live with anybody to begin with! I don’t know why he ever tried it. Woman who lives with a man like that deserves to be killed. She deserves it.” She also mourns the death of her husband by blaming her daughter, even though it was clearly Jake’s fault. Lorraine, who has subjugated herself all her life to the male hierarchy, responds by infantilizing her son, Jake, stealing his pants, keeping him in bed, and feeding him soup.

Lorraine, played for all her meanness and comedy by Karen Young, passes on the damage she endures to Jake, who, in beating Beth half to death, carries it forward to her own family, which has experienced its own damage both backward and forward in time. Shepard dramatizes the fight and its consequences, creating damaged characters propelled by their own anger and longing.

It’s an ambitious play, large and long, given an impeccable production. Added Shepard, again from The New York Times interview: “I have to admit, with this experience with ‘Lie of the Mind,’ I’ve come to see it as a bit of an awkward play. If you were to talk about it in terms of cars, it’s like an old, broken-down Buick that you kind of hold together to just get down the road. All of the characters are in a fractured place, broken into pieces, and the pieces don’t really fit together. So it feels kind of rickety to me now.” The current production guns the accelerator and sends the Buick barreling down the highway. It’s a thrilling ride.

Shepard’s characters are in flight, on the road to someplace from somewhere else, but instead of seeking or fleeing, they’re wandering. It’s this essence of lazy motion that Shepard seems to define and that seems to define the people he writes about. “I’ve been crisscrossing the country again, without much reason,” says the narrator of the story, Indianapolis (Highway 74).  “Sometimes a place will just pop into my head and I’ll take off. This time, down through Normal, Illinois, from high up in white Minnesota, dead of winter, icy roads, wind blowing sideways across empty cornfields.”

Shepard writes beautifully about nature, the seasons, the trees and birds seen from the edges of the highways. He describes rundown motels, empty town squares, iHops, and old Civil War battlefields. The collection begins with the description of the stuff on the walls of the kitchen where he works. He loves place names and the poetry his narrators wring in the midst of their desperation, such as this moment from the story, Valentine, Nebraska (Highway 20):  “I’ve had it. I can’t keep up. My car can’t take it. All the wear and tear. Four-dollar gas and we wind up in some pissant hellhole like Winnemucca or Cucamonga. I mean, what the fuck? What’s the point? And what do we have to show for it after all these miles? A bunch of damn coffee mugs with placename cafes? A buffalo paperweight. What’s it all add up to? Nada, man. Absolutely nada. I’ve come to the end of the line.”

Mostly, though, his characters keep on going. There is no end of the line when another highway leads to another interstate and when travelling itself seems to be the goal. Movement is in the blood. Wandering not only describes their actions but our own national heritage. One story consists in its entirely of a sentence a separatist leader wrote down, in Plymouth, 1620: “Our dwelling is but a wandering, and our abiding is but a fleeting, and in a word our home is nowhere.” And this sentiment is echoed in the description of one character, John, in a story titled, aptly enough, Lost Art of Wandering (Highway 152, continued): “John has actually become an artist at doing nothing; totally satisfied at being here and not worried about the next thing coming up or stewing about something in the past you can’t do anything about anyway. The Lost Art of Wandering, he calls it. He puts a title on it so as not to confuse it with plain old indolence.”

John and his two buddies appear in three stories in the collection, snapshots of their somewhat aimless attempts to track down a man called Luis Valdez, who himself always seems to be travelling. Wandering may be part of the national character, but it comes at a price. Too much of it, and you get to feel as if you have no identity. Shepard’s characters struggle with the pull between mobility and permanence, location and dislocation. He writes about actors waking up in unfamiliar hotel rooms (“day out of days” is a film production term, tallying days worked) and people drifting aimlessly by the side of the road. In Costello, an actor revisiting a place from his youth denies who he is to a childhood acquaintance.

Families are not breaking apart, they’ve already broken. The road defines and obliterates personal history. It’s a theme Shepard’s been playing with for a while. In Buried Child, his great 1978 drama of the American family, the road and the family are united in hallucinatory projections on a the inside of a car windshield: “I could see myself in the windshield. My face. My eyes. I studied my face. Studied everything about it. As though I was looking at another man. As though I could see his whole race behind him. Like  a mummy’s face. I saw him dead and alive at the same time. In the same breath…And then the face changed. His face became his father’s face. Same bones. Same eyes. Same nose. Same breath. And his father’s face changed to his grandfather’s face. And it went on like that. Changing. Clear on back to faces I’d never seen before but still recognized.”

In this collection, the road may be wiped clean of personal memories, but it’s practically crawling with historical ones. Shepard lightly touches on many locations and personalities that helped shape our land, including Ft. Robinson, Nebraska, where Crazy Horse was killed, and Butte, Montana, where Carrie Nation, “the temperance reformer famous for her hatchet-wielding saloon smashing,” was beaten almost to death. Along the way, he gives shout outs to Buffalo Bill, Teddy Roosevelt, the last English governor of Virginia, and famed jockey Willie Shoemaker. Even as the characters may be losing their own identities, the road is full of life and beauty, full of American ghosts. They might be able to escape their own pasts, but they can’t escape the country’s.

Shepard includes at the beginning of the book a quotation from Samuel Beckett. He seems to have internalized some of Beckett’s gallows humor, and hope. In a series of five stories, we encounter a man who discovers a severed head by the side of the road. The head begins to talk to him. In their purity and drive these stories could easily be a single stage piece, the disembodied talking head similar to Winnie, the woman imbedded up to her neck in sand at the beginning of the second act of Happy Days. Shepard chooses instead to make them narratives, as if he were too bothered to see them staged.

To begin with, the man who encounters the talking head has a tenuous grasp on his own identity. He “wonders how he could be so suddenly separated from his former life, his former self. And then an even deeper terror wells up that he can’t remember ever having a former life. Who was he, first thing this morning after coffee, stepping out the door on the way toward this Sunday stroll?” The man is soon hectored by the head, who demands to be moved, to be carried across the highway to a lake somewhere deeper in the desert. To emphasize the surreal nature of the whole endeavor, the man props the talking head on top of his own.

It’s a credit to Shepard’s art that this tale fits so snugly into the road realities he’s created throughout the rest of the collection. And that he can sustain the absurdity of this story, while also achieving great pathos and humor. So says the head: “It wasn’t the aloneness that gnawed away at me so much as the limbo. Not knowing where I’d wind up. Some orange dumpster headed for the Ozarks maybe. It was right about then that the frail thought of friendship visited me in the ditch. I could feel it scratching around deep in the place where my chest used to be. The absence of a body is not something you get used to right away.” Beckett would be pleased.