12/12/07: short stories

Just finished Jim Shepard's like you'd understand anyway and am thinking about it. I bought it for my Ma for Christmas, as she likes short stories, and the stories that make up this book had received so much praise and a nomination for the National Book Award. I gave it a go since it was several weeks before Christmas and I had just finished another collection of stories, All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward Jones...which was quite good itself. So I decided I'd be on a short story kick, unusual given that I am not generally a reader of short stories. I have always preferred novels and each of Shepard's stories is like a novel with all the excess removed and cooked down to its essence. While the stories vary widely in their historical, geographic, and cultural locations they are all linked thematically: disasters small and private, large and historical, unfold in these stories. Things will not end well. Some of these stories are quite grim, and there was one I finally just skimmed through, but many are relieved by touches of well-placed humor, and all are carried along by the quality of the writing. The true tribute to Shepard's skill is the ease with which his stories unfold, unencumbered by the enormous amount of research that must have gone into writing them, and which his acknowledgments spell out. I imagine most writers would not have been content to invest so much work in a mere short story. A simple summary of each story illustrates the breadth of Shepard's terrain here: Chernobyl, mental illness in a suburban family, a Roman functionary on the British frontier, high school football in Texas, Nazis hunting for Yeti in the Himalayas, an Alaskan tsunami, a doomed expedition into the interior of Australia, Aeschylus at Marathon, a lovesick female cosmonaut, two weeks of summer camp misery, and the travails of an executioner during the height of the revolutionary terror in France. Some stories are better than others, this is inevitable, but none come off as gimmicky and this is even more impressive given the economy with which he works.