You Think That's Bad

December 6, 2010
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.

January 1, 2011

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 as Godzilla, 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 of my life: 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 brother—a snow casualty—and 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 (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

December 1, 2010

Since Shepard's last short story collection, Like You'd Understand, Anyway, was nominated for a National Book Award, expectations are high for this latest effort, and it does not disappoint. There is no question concerning the breadth of research, ambition, and quality of writing that informs and characterizes this collection of short stories. In each story, Shepard displays a fascination with those moments when one world impinges upon another. Each character is mired in the past while simultaneously exploring bold new worlds and ideas, from the Arabian Desert to CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). While the exotic locations and peculiar professions capture the imagination of the reader, they also accentuate the closeness each of the characters feel between the world they wish to transcend and themselves. VERDICT Shepard's range as a writer is on full display here, with multiple voices heard in various centuries and settings. His stories are as informative as they are entertaining. Readers who enjoy Andrea Barrett or Russell Banks will appreciate this, too. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/10.]--Joshua Finnell, Denison Univ. Lib., Granville, OH

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2011
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. Japans postwar trauma is beautifully evoked in a story about the special-effects genius and creator of Godzilla, Eiji Tsuburaya, who, like most of Shepards male characters, thrives at work and fails miserably at home. Of particular eeriness is Shepards 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)