like you'd understand, anyway

Jim Shepard doesn’t need my help. There’s no place for an amanuensis here. I just want to say that I loved his book of short stories. It was the first book I read this year, the start of my long slog, begun out in the desert near Joshua Tree and finished in a comfortable chair next to our bookshelf. I still haven’t put it up, still haven’t found a place for it. Instead, it’s floated around from bedroom to office to bookbag, always within reach when I want to tell somebody about a great new book.

I’ve given it to two people: My good friend Steve Carr and my crazy guitar teacher, Pete Steinberg who refers to me as “Johan Gustafson, the famed artic explorer” (my real name is John). Whenever Pete calls me on he phone and I say hello, he says, “Is this Johan Gustafson, the famed artic explorer?” It goes on from there. Pete is a hell of a guitar player, especially finger picking blues, a great teacher, and good conversation. I record all my lessons and one day I’m going to go back, transcribe his insanity and write the Pete Steinberg story. Don’t worry, Pete. I’ll be kind. One thing Pete likes to talk about the failed adventures of history’s wayfarers. Not surprisingly, his favorite story was My First South Central Australian Expedition.

I like that one too. Who doesn’t love a good shipwreck, even in the Australian desert? But I’d say my favorite stories were the two Eastern Bloc themed ones, The Zero Meter Diving Team and Eros 7 and the high school football story Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak. But really the entire book was fun to read. I haven’t read anything else by Shepard but I’ll get there. Probably not this year, but eventually.

I really like Shepard’s humor and use of real facts. The range here of styles here is mind-boggling but you also imagine it must have been a joy to write (if writing can ever be described as being a joy). But seriously, one day (week? month?) you’re writing about three brothers dealing with the Chernobyl, the next you’re writing as Aeschylus. What also is cool is Shepard cites his sources in the Acknowledgement at the front of the book. So you see how a story like Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay, which includes an account of a tsunami and an earthquake, was shaped by real events which Shepard read up on.

Of course, this attention to detail or facts wouldn’t work if the characters weren’t compelling. “like you’d understand, anyway” is character driven. All of the stories are first person narratives. You might think this would compromise the language, but it doesn’t and this might be the true wonder of Shepard’s work. He can get away with beautiful descriptions without the language being too lyrical and distracting you from the work. For instance, in The Zero Meter Diving Team, the narrator Boris describes his severely contaminated brother who was inside Chernobyl when it blew saying, “he was so still and dark that it looked like someone had carved his life mask from rich tropical wood.” It’s a great line but it doesn’t slow the pace or bring the reader self-consciously out of the pleasure of reading.

In the two Russian stories, Shepard also captures spot on the sort of fatalistic sense of humor particular to Eastern Europeans (Actually, South Americans have this sense of humor too. Just about everybody besides Americans). When Boris visits his youngest brother, Petya in the hospital, the latter is clearly glad to see him but gives him a hard time:
“Are you feeling sorry for me?” he asked after a pause. A passing nurse seemed surprised by the question.
“Of course I am,” I told him.
“With you sometimes it’s hard to tell,” he said.

The fate of the two sick brothers is another nice touch. Petya, who Boris thinks is lazy, is confined to his apartment on a pension with his cigarettes and his tape player and no one to nag him. Mikhail, who always had problems sleeping, is finally able to rest.

But my favorite character is Solovyova, the backup female cosmonaut in the story Eros 7 whose stolid exterior hides a fascinating personality. Her answers are always calculated and spoken when the women’s superiors are within earshot. And yet she’s always needling the narrator, Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova, who has been chosen to be the first female in space. Valentina falls in love with Bykovsky, a male cosmonaut in the same program and Solovyova is not only aware of it, she’s jealous and perhaps in love with the narrator. At one point she chastises the narrator’s obvious feeling for Bykovsky. “Look at your absorption! It’s like a warped version of intellectual activity.” There’s a real sense of sadness in Solovyova, sadness for herself and her secondary position but also a sadness that her friendship with Valentina is ending. It’s in her silences and her farewell where instead of kissing three times, the two bang their helmets together.

Overall, it’s a really wonderful book, which I hope to reread soon.