Shepard's Tiny Men

A WRITER'S WIT
Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.
​Joan Didion
​Born December 5, 1934

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Ryan Heshka

December 5, 2016, Sam Shepard, “Tiny Man”: A man looks back at his life in the distant past when he is a teen, and his father is miniaturized as if appearing in a diorama. ¶ The story seems to center around—in a rather impressionistic manner of dreams and memory—one or two significant events. One, the man’s father having sex with a young woman named Felicity; then the teen having sex with Felicity. The rest seems like wallpaper or atmosphere: Shepard is a master at capturing sensory details, but they seem only to serve as a conveyance for readers as they float from one scene to the next. And perhaps this move is Shepard’s intent, attempting to create for readers the same jumbled mass of memories, some of which are vivid, the others of which are faint or exaggerated—very Freudian, although the narrator makes light of such an idea: 

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“No matter. People will talk. It could also be that I’m dreaming him like that—tiny—because it’s a way of distancing myself, but that’s a bit Freudian, don’t you think? As though there were some kind of intelligence driving all this—the subconscious or some bullshit like that. Something I find hard to believe in. Why would I want to be distanced, anyway? There’s nothing I’m still afraid of” (73)

So many fathers become tiny—not because they are dead but because they are insignificant and perhaps they always were—and the author brings this idea to life. Shepard’s novel, The One Inside, comes out in February.
Illustrated by Ryan Heshka.

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