Spy of the First Person

Shepard's final fiction, as enduringly resonant as any of his work, features an older man actively dredging up memories but increasingly stilled by the ravages of a disease that leaves him dependent on caretakers—the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, in fact, that took Shepard's life. At first observed, he becomes observer, offering descriptions of his surroundings and movements in language that's stripped of superfluity but imaginatively rich in content. Memories frequently surface, coherent but in fragments, and the narrator volunteers that while he can't stop thinking about the past, "I know the present is the place to be…. Because assumedly the present is what's making memories." The spare language offers subtle repetitions and echoes, as if the narrator were turning things over and over in his still attentive mind, drilling down to clarify and fix what he is thinking. The obvious questions of old age appear—"Where exactly do we come from?"—but the reading experience remains astonishingly immediate and tactile.