A Lie of the Mind Book

A Lie of the Mind opens on both side of a phone conversation between Jake and Frankie. During the course of their phone conversation, we learn that Jake and Frankie are brothers, that Frankie has beaten his wife to death (or so he thinks), and that Frankie is trying to locate Jake before he does any more damage (to himself or someone else).

Jake's wife, Beth, is not dead, but hospitalized with severe brain damage. She is joined by her brother, Mike, and later by their parents. Jake and Frankie are joined by their sister, Sally, and their mother.

In fact, the attack has left both Jake and Beth helpless in their care of their families. Beth is brain damaged, reduced to varying states of coherence/incoherence. Jake is despondent, believing he has killed his wife. Admittedly, I take issue with the depiction of both Jake and Beth.

I believe Jake the abusive husband, his over-the-top demeanor suiting his character, but I don't believe Jake the victim, acting erratically. What redeems his character is the suggestion that we're not supposed to believe Jake the victim. Sally, his sister, suggests that he is pretending, having seen it all before.

With Beth, Shepard's depiction of a woman with brain damage is constantly skirting bad taste. Her varying coherence/incoherence, that sometimes descends into "savage" screaming, is evocative of a tired stereotype, the hysterical woman. This is corroborated by her family history: her grandmother was mentally ill, and later her mother shows signs of mental illness. There may be believable aspects to her character, specifically during her recovery. But overall, Shepard's portrayal of Beth's mental illness is problematic.

The best argument in favour of Shepard's portrayal of Beth (and her mental illness) is that Shepard is less concerned with plausibility, and more concerned with an archetypal approach to Beth's character. Just as she has been stripped down to her base/raw attributes, so too she is able to strip down other characters.
"This - this is my father. He's given up love. Love is dead for him. My mother is dead for him. Things live for him to be killed. Only death counts for him. Nothing else. This - This - This is me. This is me now. The way I am. Now. This. All. Different. I- I live inside this. Remember. Remembering. You. You - were one. I know you. I know - love. I know what love is. I can never forget. That. Never." (Act 2, Scene 1)

The play is commonly criticized (on Goodreads) for its abject characters. Indeed, they are abject. But I consider this to be one of the play's strengths. Readers familiar with Sam Shepard will recognize these characters. Having read a number of Shepard's plays, it occurs to me that his characters are drawn from the same source. They are derivative not of cliché/charicateur, but of archetype.

The brothers Jake and Frankie resemble the brothers of True West , one hopelessly lost and the other with his feet seemingly on the ground (although his footing will surely be tested).

The most prominent of Shepard's archetypes may be the dysfunctional family. I doubt I've read a Shepard play with a functional family. (You may be inclined to ask: "What is a functional family?" A valid question. Suffice to say that Shepard's families are far from functional.) Shepard's outlook on the family unit recalls the opening lines of
Tolstoy's Anna Karenina : "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Although we encounter similar dynamics (rivalry, spite, abandonment, etc...), Shepard's unhappy families are uniquely unhappy. Particularly in the case of A Lie of the Mind, comparable to the families of Buried Child and Curse of the Starving Class .