LITTLE ROCK — Like You'd Understand, Anyway, by Jim Shepard, Knopf, 211 pages, $23.
Fathers misunderstanding sons. Brothers clashing with brothers. Men undertaking dangerous exploits in pursuit of theories that are patently absurd. Jim Shepard casts a cool yet ultimately sympathetic eye on those who perpetrate such follies and, in doing so, reveals their humanity.
There are 11 stories in Like You'd Understand, Anyway, and some recapitulate the themes and outre settings of his 2004 collection, Love and Hydrogen. Shepard has published six novels and two other story compilations. Here, his tales range from an unhappy home in Connecticut to the battlefields of ancient Greece and the radiationwracked environs of Chernobyl to the vastness of outer space, and all but one have male narrators.
What links them is competition, violence, madness and misguided respect for hierarchy. Shepard, who has an emotionally ill brother, sometimesbroaches that topic in his work, publicly expressing private pain.
He does it in "Proto-Scorpions of the Silurian," which begins:
"It's a crappy rainy morning in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and I'm home from seventh grade with a sore throat and my parents and brother are fighting and I'm trying every so often to stay out of it."
It's a story full of sarcastic invective and wounded love that, in less than five pages, reveals a family at the breaking point from the unsolvable frustrations of living with a powder-keg kid.
Brothers also figure in "The Zero Meter Diving Team." It lays out, with fierce irony and escalating desperation, the horrors of the nuclear reactor meltdown at Chernobyl and the buck-passing perfected by a system aimed at "inculcating industriousness (somewhat successfully), obedience (fairly successfully) and toadyism (very successfully)."
Not that such a mentality was unique to the Soviets. In "Ancestral Legacies," two Germans are on top of the world, yet in bottomless despair, trekking theHimalayas in pursuit of proof for Heinrich Himmler's insane theories about the "core of the Nordic-Aryan legacy." One is dying of an infected leg wound; the other is acerbically recounting their impossible task. Lurking nearby, there may be yetis. The men are, of course, just following orders.
Similar is "The First South Central Australian Expedition." It is 1840 and a party of men sets out through the wasteland Down Under with tons of provisions and equipment - and a whaleboat.
Yes, a whaleboat in the desert. The expedition's leader is certain a mountain range exists beyond which must lie "a vast inland sea" that they will discover and sail upon. With great determination, they pursue this fool's quest in a paean to misguided leadership and loyalty. Their excruciating travails are exquisitely detailed by Shepard. Noting any resemblance to a war of choice in the Middle East is entirely up to you.
Shepard also takes us to the ancient Roman empire in "Hadrian's Wall" and long-ago Greece in "My Aeschylus," where the great playwright fights atMarathon alongside his brother, still, in middle age, seeking his father's love and respect. In "Sans Farine," we see life from the perspective of the guillotine-master of the French Revolution.
In "Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak," the time is now, the battlefield is a football field, the language is profane and the narrator also seeks his father. "Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay" is set in Alaska, and here the subject is tsunamis and the travails of romance. "Eros 7" is told by a female cosmonaut in love, and while no diapers were harmed to make this story, there is more than a whiff of compulsive love.
The coda of "Courtesy for Beginners," set in the casual brutality of summer camp, sums up what Shepard strives for, and accomplishes, in this fine book:
"And my story was: I survived camp. I survived my brother. I survived my own bad feelings. Love me for being so sad about it. Love me for knowing what I did. Love me for being in the lifeboat after everyone else went under. And my story made me feel better and it made me feel worse. And it worked."
Travel, Pages 92 on 10/07/2007