Customer Reviews

Great Dream of Heaven: Stories

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Shepard, the well-known playwright and actor, has written eighteen brief stories that are filled with unforgettable images. They deal with the unexpected reactions of human nature, especially sex and the yearnings for things that no longer exist. Shepard is at his best with these stories as he clearly and effortless describes the sorrows, joys, and fallibility of everyday life.

I enjoyed all of Shepards stories in his second collection of fiction. It would be hard to choose any one favorite, but Blinking Eye is one I will never forget. It will leave an unforgettable image on your mind. It is about a young girl driving cross-country bearing an urn containing her mothers ashes when she encounters an injured hawk on the side of the road. She decides to take the injured hawk to a veterinarian for help. What happens after she places the hawk in her car will definitely leave a vivid image in your mind forever.

Shepards gift of writing is effortless to read for he brings all of his stories to life in a clear, concise, and beautifully detailed matter. This is a book not to be missed!!

Joe Hanssen

Fans of playwright Sam Shepard will enjoy this collection of short pieces, many of them not more than monologues or brief sketches of dialogue. Sometimes the blanks are filled in and we get an actual short story, as in the title story, about two elderly men who compete for the attention of a waitress at Denny's. Also, "An Unfair Question," in which an over-inquisitive party guest interested in guns is taken to the basement by her host, who becomes dangerously impatient with her.

Others tend toward a Mamet-like fascination with the way people talk who have little to say and don't listen to each other. In "Living the Sign," a fast-food customer tries unsuccessfuly to strike up a conversation with the young employees about a thoughtful message hung over the chicken wings. A father and his two school-age children, in "Berlin Wall Piece," struggles without much success - or gratitude - to help his son with a homework assignment. Two telephone conversations comprise the extent of "Coalinga 1/2 Way," in which one person attempts vainly to keep the other person from walking out of a relationship. Four voice mail messages comprise another, as a shady character reports to a client on the fate of an injured race horse in "Tinnitus."

Two personal favorites are "The Remedy Man," about a man who breaks a willful horse, as well as the tyrannical hold of a father over his son, and the monologue "The Company's Interest," in which a lone night-shift filling station attendant is confronted by two long haired, tatooed and much overweight customers.

Mostly set in the West, many in California, this collection of stories shows flashes of mercurial creative intelligence sending off sparks of story fragments - characters, situations, dialogue, each elusive and elliptical, verbal fireworks against a night sky, your imagination filled with evocative afterimages. BTW, the cover photo is by Jessica Lange.

Readers should not approach Shepard's book with expectations of reading traditional short stories. Rather, in this collection of eighteen condensed fictions, Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright and Oscar-nominated actor, Sam Shepard shows us a dreamlike country populated with troubled cowboys, fast-food workers, suburban gun owners, and lonely gas station employees. And he doesn't waste words. While some pieces of Shepard's HEAVEN shine brighter than others (like the title story of two old friends driven apart by a Denny's waitress and the collection's first story, "Remedy Man," about a fixer of bad horses), all of them offer up truths as real as earthly dirt. He has it as an actor. He has it as a playwright. And with this collection, Sam Shepard proves that he has the right stuff as a fiction writer.

G. Merritt

Sam Shepard, a world-renowned playwright, is also an excellent short story author. His collection, Great Dream of Heaven, is innovative, refreshing, fast moving, and brilliant. I found myself reading some of the stories out loud to my friends and family. Great Dream of Heaven is a must read.

"Life is what's happening to you while you're making plans for something else." That one sentence from "Living the Sign", sums up this entire collection of simple stories that really hit the nail on the head. The story itself is a metaphor for the collection: The sentence is posted on a sign in a fast food joint by one of its employees, and the sign prompts one customer to begin a mini journey of discovery to find the one prescient individual among the glassy-eyed help behind the counter.

In "The Remedy Man" we get a simple take on the proverbial Horse Whisperer (though E.V., the title character wouldn't classify himself as such - hence the title - he fixes things). But, is this the story of E.V. fixing a horse, or that of him helping a young boy find his own strength and way under the thumb of his controlling father?

The characters in these stories, whether a man unable to grasp his role as father and husband who takes another partygoer hostage at gun point or so obsessed with horse breeding that he locks himself away from his family annually to study catalogs, are either at moments of absolute clarity or complete detachment from life. And, Shepard's sharp, concise dialog and writing snaps right to the point every time.

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A Guide to my Book Rating System:

1 star = The wood pulp would have been better utilized as toilet paper.
2 stars = Don't bother, clean your bathroom instead.
3 stars = Wasn't a waste of time, but it was time wasted.
4 stars = Good book, but not life altering.
5 stars = This book changed my world in at least some small way.

Shepard has thrown away everything not absolutely necessary to get at the core of what matters.

Each story in this slim volume gets to the center of a facet of life and illuminates it.

Though every tale is stripped to essentials each is true to life.

Perfect reading for a Sunday afternoon.

Highly recommended.

A little too slick, a little too quick. There are eighteen stories in this collection and they all read like magazine short-shorts, so I'm surprised to note that only two of them were first printed in mags. I catch myself thinking, invidiously, that Sam Shepard is just too good-looking to write a powerful story, but then I recall that he's really a very fine playwright, possibly the best in the USA. I first saw True West on stage a good 25 years ago, with Ed Harris playing the lead, and I can't think of any American stage play that has delivered as much punch. None of the stories in "Great Dream of Heaven" have that sort of impact. Shepard is as good an actor as any, and a guy on the right side of a lot of social issues, so I feel presumptuous NOt finding his stories very solid. I have to wonder why he bothers to write them; he plainly doesn't need the trivial income or the plaudits.

It's not that the stories are badly crafted. If anything, they're technically glib. Almost all of them portray moments of failure, epiphanies of emptiness, in the lives of vulnerable losers like the majority of "us". Shepard seems possibly to have been influenced by short-story 'specialist' Raymond Carver; both writers give us a vision of life as a bumpy succession of disappointments heightened by an occasional intense grief. But whereas carver's strength is in his fraternity with his losers, Shepard comes across as "judgmental", willing to exploit his characters for a fashionable well-turned scenario. Hey, maybe he really is just too good-looking to empathize with his own people.

"Great Dreams of Heaven" is a quick read at a breezy 142 pages. Some of these stories would jump alive in an oral reading because they are essentially prose dramas. "Betty's Cats" is a wonderful example of a lady who just refuses to see that a trailer full of cats, even if they stink and complaints have been made to the health department, could be a nuisance to anyone. "Living the Sign" is a great little drama about a guy who stops into a fast food shop, sees a handwritten sign, "Life is what's happening to you while you're making plans for something else." He proceeds to grill the counter clerks until he find out who wrote the sign. After the long investigation, he finds his answer in the geeky Dicky; the piece ends with a little profundity about plans. My favorite story is "It Wasn't Proust" which is essentially an argument between a husband & wife over past romances in France; the dialogue sparkles with the banter having edge & wit. While a couple stories are too short to gain momentum and a couple are puzzle pieces, overall this a wonderful blend of prose and drama. Enjoy!