Maybe the guy's a master of disguise. Or just well-read. Yeah, just. Read the Acknowledgments of Shepard's new short story collection Like You'd Understand, Anyway and you'll find books and articles from Don J. Miller's "The Alaska Earthquake of July 10, 1958" to Nic Fields' Hadrian's Wall A.D. 122-410 and everything (and I do mean everything) in between.
These eleven first-person narratives aren't just good stories with historical backdrops. Sure, you certainly get the feeling that Shepard was hanging out with a middle-aged Aeschylus at Marathon, was floating around with the first woman cosmonaut inside a Soviet capsule, was hauling a whaleboat through the Great Australian Desert in 1840. But there's much more.
Shepard gives the reader eleven wildly differing settings and times, yet wherever (and whenever) you go, conflict is conflict. It becomes very clear that Shepard knows just as much about relationships as he does about history. Many of these relationships are either between brothers or sons and fathers, but not all. Many are strained, many are broken, some are as shattered as a crystal vase dropped from the Sears Tower. But Shepard doesn't stop with relational conflicts. There are also conflicts with the setting, the external circumstances that each narrator has either chosen or been forced into. (Forced into? Chosen? You decide.)
Filled with dark humor, drama, tragedy, introspection and yearning, these tales stick with you after you've finished them, refusing to go away. I couldn't read more than one at a sitting. I suppose some of that is due to the vast differences and settings of the stories. I mean, it's hard to jump from 1986 Chernobyl straight to Tibet's Chang Tang tundra. But these are stories to savor, anyway, stories you can get lost inside. Highly recommended.
2 comments:
I'm about half-way done with his earlier collection Love and Hydrogen. For me, there are stories that are absolutely fantastic and there are those that don't do much for me.
Stories that tend not to do much for me typically revolve around domestic angst or familial disputes. Not that they're bad stories, I just feel like I've seen them a billion times. I'm like you--I like the ones in strange locations and filled with quirky details.
I'll have to pick this up when I get time. Probably in 2015 at this rate...
I was initially sucked into Shepard's world through his story "Sans Farine" from The Best American Short Stories 2007, which is also included in Shepard's new collection. The only story that didn't really connect with me was the Aeschylus story, and I think that was probably due to reading too late at night. But it's definitely worth checking out --- even if you have to wait until 2015 ;)
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