Review by New York Times Review
IT'S unclear why Jim Shepard tends to collect his short stories under titles that seem more like shrugs: his latest "You Think That's Bad," follows a 2007 volume called "Like You'd Understand, Anyway." The contents are anything but lackadaisical. Shepard's taut high-concept, research-dependent fiction covers a bracing, career-long range of hobbyhorses and obsessions. Nazis, horror movies, aircraft and explorers abound. Historical fiction is typically so ample and epilogic that the "historical short story" may seem a contradiction in terms, but Shepard has made himself, in particular, a master of this small, tricky subgenre. (His colleague at Williams College, Andrea Barrett, is another.) Shepard has already written a novel about F. W. Murnau, the director of "Nosferatu," the 1922 German film adaptation of "Dracula," and a short story narrated by the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The longest story in this collection, "Gojira, King of the Monsters," explores the career and private life of Eiji Tsuburaya, the special-effects creator of "Godzilla." Tsuburaya struggles with the American mangling of his masterpiece; with memories of a disapproving father who died as a result of the 1923 Tokyo earthquake; and with his own guilt over neglecting his marriage in favor of work. He joins a whole company of bad husbands in Shepard's fiction, emotional withholders who climb mountains, work on the super collider or operate in the "black world" of secret defense research. They don't perform well in the domestic sphere. "Happy With Crocodiles," like "Gojira," takes the reader back several decades and into the Far East where Shepard recreates an American infantry assault on the Japanese in New Guinea. The callow protagonist battles not only the enemy and the hellish weather but his anxiety about the girlfriend he left behind, who was always more fixated on his brother. Shepard alternates between this dismaying back story and the brutal narrative foreground, and while he convinces us of their shared "ugliness," he courts anticlimax by returning us to teenagers making out in the back seat of a car while we're still being harrowed in the jungle. This back-and-forth method is one he frequently uses to great advantage, but here it may rob an excellent story of the chance to be a great one. Shepard's acknowledgments sometimes verge on bibliography; "Victory in Papua: The War in the Pacific" is one of 11 sources he cites for "Happy With Crocodiles." But anyone who thinks this is overdoing it - and that the fictional results of such preparation will tend, at best, toward a sort of "creative nonfiction" - is unacquainted with Shepard's ability to accumulate and transform specifics and oddments. There are few writers today with more artful gifts for active, authentic description. Shepard doesn't pick one or two "telling details"; he propels the reader through whole bravura paragraphs of them. Here, in part, is how it rains on the soldiers in New Guinea: "Four days into it our clothes started rotting. . . . The mud got into mess kits and stew pots and underwear and eyes. Guys walked through some areas by holding on to ropes tied tree-to-tree. ... Shoes were gardens of green mold around the insoles." Aided by a collector's love for the diction and lingo of his arcane subjects, Shepard also works splendidly on the level of short phrasing. In "Happy With Crocodiles," the shirt of a just-shot soldier comes "alive from the inside," and in "Gojira," the mobile, miniature special effects of Tsuburaya's idol are "suitcase jungles." When Shepard situates his accomplished antiheroes in the present or near future, he generally has them fending off, or submitting to, catastrophe: burial by avalanche; drowning in the consequences of global warming. "Poland Is Watching" becomes the author's "Right Stuff": the wives of a mountaineering team sit fuming at home while their husbands go off to the Himalayas to attempt a wintertime ascent of the world's ninth-highest peak. The women back in Poland are able to telephone the men at their encampments, and the narrator, nagged and abashed by his wife's voice, ends up stumbling toward a frozen death that Shepard evokes in one of the lyrical closings he often favors. Along with his creative obsessives, Shepard has over the years assembled a gallery of middle-school misfits, the best known of them being the Columbine-style killers of his 2004 novel "Project X." We now get, in "Boys Town," an older version of the type, an unemployed, laughed-at, mother-tormented P.T.S.D. veteran who decides to go "off the grid" and into the woods with some canned food and a rifle: "I joined an Owners' Forum on one of the USA Carry Web sites for a little while," the narrator explains, "to get some tips and just talk to somebody. My user name was MrNoTrouble." Shepard needs no bibliography for this one - just his imagination and a little help from the newspapers. He works the story's titular conceit, the old Spencer Tracy-Mickey Rooney movie, rather hard, but the overall results feel more concentrated and poignant than the ones in "Project X." The unforced first-person narration gives Shepard a smooth vocal success that occasionally eludes him in other stories, when his narrators start speaking with too much of his own smart, stainless-steel articulacy: one talks of somebody "negotiating his solitude"; another remarks upon someone who "negotiated the burden of her sexual magnetism." Shepard's themes and techniques achieve neat alignment in "The Netherlands Lives With Water," a story set 20 or so years in the future, when the Dutch are struggling to keep their feet above water. The main character is a climate researcher for "the Weak Links Project, an overeducated fire brigade formed to address new vulnerabilities the minute they emerged." His wife works in the same urgent field but can't get her husband to be any more emotionally available than Shepard's other men. When she and their child leave for higher ground, the protagonist and the reader are pitifully marooned. The cascading details of the story's water world are as striking and abundant as their New Guinea equivalents. The narrator's mother remembers the Dutch floods of 1953: "a vast plain of wreckage on the water and the smell of dead fish traveling on the wind, . . . two older boys sitting beside her and examining the silt driven inside an unopened bottle of soda by the force of the waves." Only rarely does Shepard meander. "Classical Scenes of Farewell" has Etienne Corillaut recounting the pedophihac serial killings carried out by his lord and master, Gilles de Rais, during the late 1430s: "He emptied three full basins trying to clean his eyes after a boy's brains had bespattered them." Michel Tournier conducted a fictional tour of this charnel house back in the 1980s in "Gilles & Jeanne," and really didn't leave enough bones for Shepard to pick through. Still, the rarefied material in this book results in remarkably few misfires. When he states his belief that writers "tend to forget just how many of fiction's pleasures . . . have nonfiction components," Shepard is not only defending his method; he's expressing a respect for life itself. His fine contrivances of cerebration and feeling can remind one of Richard Powers at his best. And his preference for historical quests, for real people's big gestures, may help keep American short fiction from falling asleep in the snug little precincts of its usual subject matter. Thomas Mallon's most recent novels are "Bandbox" and "Fellow Travelers." Shepard has made himself a master of a small, tricky subgenre - the historical short story.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 27, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Inclined toward tales of obsession and risk, exceptionally imaginative Shepard is fascinated by the nexus of landscape and mindscape, passion and emotional paralysis. In his fourth highly original collection, stories set in the present dramatize debilitating isolation. A master of the demanding, hence, rare genre of historical short stories, Shepard portrays the bold explorer Freya Stark as she treks across the stony wilds of Iran in the early 1930s. All-but-forgotten scientific and military ventures are the catalysts for two breathtaking stories about love triangles; one involves avalanches in the Swiss Alps; the other, the devouring jungle of New Guinea during WWII. Japan's postwar trauma is beautifully evoked in a story about the special-effects genius and creator of Godzilla, Eiji Tsuburaya, who, like most of Shepard's male characters, thrives at work and fails miserably at home. Of particular eeriness is Shepard's take on Gilles de Rais, the fifteenth-century French serial killer who preyed on children. Shepard also envisions a catastrophic future in a tale about a Dutch hydraulic engineer battling family crises and rising sea levels. There is so much knowledge, insight, feeling, and artistry in each engrossing Shepard story, he must defy some law of literary physics.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The protagonists in Shepard's elegant, darkly tinged stories of love, sometimes misplaced, are searching for something. There's Freya Stark, the ambitious heroine in "The Track of the Assassins," who sets out in 1930 across the Middle East desert with only a guide, a muleteer, and Marco Polo's Travels. Or the narrator of "Netherlands Lives with Water," who grapples with changes in global climate, relationships, and life in Rotterdam, all the while searching for a solution and knowing deep down there isn't one. In "Happy Crocodiles," a miserable WWII G.I. stuck in New Guinea thinks about his stateside girlfriend and her puzzling relationship with his brother while trying to survive the elements and the enemy. As in his earlier Like You'd Understand, Anyway, Shepard's characters cover a wide swath of experience: Department of Defense black ops researchers, avalanche scientists, the inventor of Godzilla. Or they're 38 and living with their mother, like Martin in "Boys Town." There's humor in unexpected places, particularly as glaciers melt and waters rise in "Netherlands," which reminds us that though what we've lost might be different, we're all missing something. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Shepard presents a collection of high-concept, exhilarating stories, with a kaleidoscopic cast of characters ranging from a hydraulics engineer to a depraved murderer to the creator of Godzilla. While skillfully written, these tales are completely character-driven; very little actually happens. They mostly stop rather than end, but Bronson Pinchot's deft reading keeps them engaging. (LJ 6/15/1 1) (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A story collection of expansive postmodernism that combines bursts of humor with flashes of tragedy.Though Shepard(Like You'd Understand, Anyway,2007, etc.) often writes in the first person, the narrator never sounds like an authorial stand-in and often relates events at a great geographical and/or chronological remove from the reader. In other words, these aren't stories about what life is like right now, though they may well be about both the possibilities and limitations of words, and of fiction. They aren't difficult stories, exactly, though some can seem as exasperating as they are amusing or engaging. "Gojira, King of the Monsters" explores the making of the movie that would be known Stateside asGodzilla,in the wake of World War II and its effects on the Japanese film industry. "Man had created war and the Bomb and now nature was going to exact its revenge, with tormented Gojira its way of making radiation visible." In "Classical Scenes of Farewell," a medieval manservant gives matter-of-fact accounts of child dismemberment in the 1400s. In "Boys Town," a psychologically beleaguered vet and wife abuser who lives with his mother opens his account: "Here's the story ofmylife: whatever I did wasn't good enough, anything I figured out I figured out too late, and whenever I tried to help I made things worse." The accuracy of his self-assessment aside, he proves to be a very unreliable narrator. "Your Fate Hurtles Down at You" concerns avalanche research in the Alps of the late 1930s, when a man contemplates his relationship with his late, twin brothera snow casualtyand his ardor for his brother's girlfriend. Within these stories, the connections of causality (or lack thereof) occasionally recall Donald Barthelme. The volume concludes with another story about fatal mountains, on a Polish climbing expedition toward a peak known as "a widow maker" and the domestic life left below.The narrator of one story in this collection writes that, when the weather rages, communication is "reduced to hand signals with mittens." Some of this writing feels like that.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
