PositiveThe Washington PostSam Shepard was a complicated man. Capturing his persona and making a clear narrative out of his mercurial life are not easy tasks ... What Robert Greenfield’s new biography, True West, achieves in its finest pages is placing the artist in his time. Greenfield recounts the ebb and flow of Shepard’s growth as a playwright, and chronicles how the fame and adulation from his life as a movie actor both propelled and thwarted his gifts as a writer. The book is especially successful at bringing the reader into the world that Shepard inhabited as he developed into one of the greatest American dramatists of the late 20th century ... The biography dives deepest into this time period, and I hope it will inspire others (as it inspired me) to reread his early plays. They are magnificent in their originality, playfulness and sheer rock-and-roll sensibility ... In his long life there is much to gossip about, and the biography avoids most of the sordid details that might have preoccupied a less serious biographer. Thankfully, Greenfield focuses on the life of Shepard the artist ... It’s a curious experience to read a biography of someone you knew written by someone who did not know them. I opened this book eager to find out how a more objective observer would view and summarize such an elusive man’s life ... But the man remains essentially inscrutable, as if we are cross-examining him from the distance of a drone — we learn where and when he went, but we have no idea why. And that is probably the way Sam Shepard would have liked it.
Wolf Wondratschek, Trans. by Marshall Yarbrough
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThis novel is at once egoless, sly, profound, funny, authentic and utterly mysterious—without ever seeming to break a sweat ... An immense humility encompasses the novel. In a world that shouts, this book is a song played softly, and slowly ... Wondratschek’s story reveals itself to be entirely original and uncontrived. The contemporary nervous system of the average American (me) is unprepared for this book: It demands patient, sustained attention to be heard. To hurry through or expect to be \'entertained\' is to entirely miss the point. If one is willing to linger in this novel’s final echo, the effect is worthwhile ... Wondratschek writes the way his hero plays.
