Customer Reviews

Eternity and Other Stories

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I don't often respond to reviews, but I do want to respond to a cheap shot taken at me by Tim Symms--certain of his comments about my 9/11 story, Only Parlly Here, cast aspersions on my character, and other of his comments embody an attitude I find somewhat sad.

Mr. Symms seems especially chagrinned--indeed, insulted--that I dare write about 9/11 not having been in NYC at the time, not joining in the relief effort. Well, I almost was. I was scheduled to fly to NYC on Sept. 12 to attend my son's wedding. When I was able to reschedule, I spent several weeks in the city, some of that time with a group of people who were cleaning up the debris. My story involves itself with that time, not the attack. What really burns me about Mr. Simms' comments is his statement, "Lucius wasn't in New York during the attack. He was in our homeland, however. He went to the movies...", thereby implying that I went out for some light entertainment and some tasty popcorn that same day. Part of my income is derived from doing movie reviews. I was doing my job and, further, when I went to the movies several days later, I was mainly fleeing my apartment, escaping the barrage of horrific imagery on my television set. I wanted to be alone in the dark where I could think about my son, about other matters, where I could feel the beating of my heart,and not have its beats programmed by the insipid commentary of Paula Zahn et al. Doubtless, while I was so engaged, Mr. Simms was saving the planet from his command center in Boca Raton, but that's another subject entirely.

This idea that 9/11 is so vast and sacrosanct that it cannot be touched, that we must wait to savor all its aftertastes, that if it is to be approached at all, we must bow out heads and paint them gray...Where did it come from? Vietnam, I think. We'd had it with Vietnam, too much TV, etc, and we didn't want to hear novelists on the subject. Thus a lot of great Vietnam novels (MEDITATIONS IN GREEN, for example) written during or immediately after the war were more-or-less overlooked or just plain ignored. Wherever it came from, this desire not to know, not to hear from our most eloquent voices, until after a mourning period and then a period of acceptance or whatever, it's time we got over it. Since 9/11 there have been disasters that dwarf the fall of the towers -- are we to wait years before we write about them, and if we do, won't other disasters supplant them? Given the frequency of disasters, there's likely going to be a logjam. Speak now is my advice. Speak now and speak often. You may not have ten years. Even if you do, your immediate reactions are as a valuable, perhaps more valuable, than ones processed from memory.

I'm sure there'll be at least one major 9/11 novel. It'll be praised for its "great humanity;" weigh slightly under eight pounds; win the Pullitzer; have legions of readers (Mr Symms among them, no doubt) who'll tote it around like it was the Bible; avoid dealing with politics in any controversial way; contain a predictable assortment of characters (including at least one college professor); have a sub-plot involving yuppie redemption; and, who knows, perhaps it'll even be readable.

I tried to post this without a rating, but they won't let me, so...that being the case, damned if I'm gonna give myself less than five stars.

Lucius Shepard

What is Tim Symms on about?

He appears to object to Lucius Shepard's 9/11 story because 1) it was written shortly after 9/11 and estimable figures like Norman Mailer, Ian McEwan, and VS Naipaul have advised that such a vast subject should be processed slowly over the years, or else, in McEwan's case, not addressed at all; 2) because it's the "superficially whimsical tale of a grad student and

a ghost..." 3) because he was not there in NYC. And he does all this in a review entitled IS THIS ALL WE NEED TO KNOW ABOUT 9/11?

To answer Symm's question, of course it isn't. Shepard's piece is a short story, and no story, no novel, no non-fiction work is likely to tell us all we need to know about it, until--that is--Time or some other corporate entity gives us an event book, ALL YOU EVER NEED TO KNOW ABOUT 9/11.

Shepard's story, far from whimsical and superficial, is a beautifully observed, concise work of fiction that details the numbness we all felt at the time. It does not attempt to gauge the economic aftershocks, the geo-political concerns, etc., that arose from that day--that was not its purpose. Despite the testimony of Mailer, Naipaul, and McEwan, some fiction benefits from immediacy, the way good journalism does.

"Only Partly Here" is not about a ghost and a grad student. It's about a man who has been a student and now works clearing away the debris left from the destruction of the towers. The woman in question may or may not be a ghost; she may be, and this is my reading, a real person whom the man, in his trauma and confusion, relates to as a ghost. Shepard leaves it to the

reader to make this choice. Curiously enough, Symms says Shepard relies on "the art of the fantastical to explain 9/11," and then goes on to cite a Patrick McGrath novella about a ghost and a psychiatrist as being better and more complex. More complex? Dude, it's a novella. By virtue of length alone, it's bound to be more complex than Shepard's piece. Better, I can't

say, not having read it. But McGrath is a fine writer...as is Shepard.

As to Shepard's not being present in NYC at the time of 9/11, does Symms think Hemmingway did everything he wrote about? Novelists and short story writers frequently write about events they did not participate in, but Symms, making an odious comparison between Shepard's absence from Ground Zero and George Bush's, seems to think this is a pre-requisite to writing.

Shepard's female character wants to know what it's like in the pit where the towers were, and his male protagonist is too wasted by the experience to tell her--that strikes me as a wonderful metaphor for the way Americans were feeling on 9/11 and directly afterward. Just because we weren't there

doesn't invalidate what we felt. To dismiss what is patently an excellent collection--and this is a great story collection, folks--on the basis of a misapprehension concerning one story is shameful. Five stars all the way.

Symms suggests that Shepard wrote better in the eighties. Forget about it. ETERNITY AND OTHER STORIES is the real quill.

Lucius Shepard, Eternity and Other Stories (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2005)

Lucius Shepard is one of America's finest overlooked writers, a man who has labored in relative obscurity (relative, that is, to the popularity he should have obtained twenty years ago) his entire career, turning out finely polished gems of prose in a world that, it would seem, prizes rough cuts. Eternity and Other Stories is Shepard's most recent, as of this writing, collection of short fiction, and like every other book of Shepard's I've read to date, I can unhesitatingly give it the Misanthrope (and Goat) stamp of approval.

While the stories here are very good-- open to a random page and you'll get finer writing than you will in 95% of the books published last year, guaranteed-- the collection is slightly inconsistent. Shepard's penchant for thick, somewhat difficult prose always runs the risk of a story getting bogged down in a lack of pace, and it does happen here on occasion; "Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?" is an especially slow trek, without the kind of million-dollar payoff at the end that makes some difficult books among the best you'll ever read (Grass' Dog Years and Walker's The Secret Service come to mind). But these are balanced out by the stories that, while still thick going, grab you and absolutely refuse to let go until you've turned the final page; these comprise the bulk of the book. "Jailwise" and "Eternity and Afterward," the book's final two pieces, are especially good at this sort of thing, despite being the two longest stories here (I didn't count words, but I'd be willing to bet that "Eternity and Afterward" is almost as long as Shepard's brilliant 2004 novel Viator); they caused me to forgo food and sleep.

There aren't enough different ways for me to say "you can't go wrong with Lucius Shepard;" eventually I may have to stop reviewing his work altogether, simply because the reviews will turn into carbon copies of one another. But really, there's nothing else to be said-- you can't go wrong with Lucius Shepard. *** ½

I was happy to see Mr. Shepard's contribution here and I hope he keeps reading these comments.

Only Partly Here is a special story for me. I was present one-block from Ground Zero during the attack, at my office in a building just North of the Post Office. I saw people die that day and ran for my life like thousands of others (both, for the first and only time in my life), and felt that I had experienced war. The weeks afterwards were as unreal as any that can be lived. There was a bar across the street from my office that I believe Mr. Shepard must have visited because he captured it perfectly in the 'Blue Lady' -- its called Dakota's Roadhouse and is notable only for cheap drinks and a good jukebox, and it was a hangout for people from my agency for a time, and later for the pit workers. We moved to Maiden Lane while the pit was still burning, but we went back to Dakota's as soon as it reopened. We were steeped in the smell of our City still burning, and we had many occasions to visit the death-stalked "London during the blitz" landscape that was previously a big piece of our lives and our city.

I read Only Partly Here as soon as it was published in Asimov's and I cried. It captures perfectly the mood, the place and the time. It also captures perfectly the peculiar pain a man feels when trying desperately to connect with a woman who, even if living, is not truly present for other people. I never connected with my particular living ghost of Ground Zero, but I connected totally with Mr. Shepard's story. It is the finest piece of 9/11 literature I know, and one of the best short stories I've read, period. Thank you, thank you Mr. Shepard. (I would have been at Readercon to thank you in person, but my wife was having a baby at the time.)

I'll comment on the first review posted here as well. "Only Partly Here" ain't whimsical, superficially or otherwise. (I'm hard-pressed to think of a "whimsical" Lucius Shepard story, maybe a few darkly humorous ones, but that's about it.) One erroneous and tangential set of comments about a single story in a book doesn't add up to a review; I don't get it. Equally puzzling to me is this reference to Mr. Shepard's "high period" during the 80s. He first hit the scene during the 80s, but for anyone paying attention, Lucius Shepard's high period is right now; for the last few years, he's published well over a quarter million words of short fiction annually -- in addition to a novel now and then -- and nearly all of it superior to his work in the 80s that won the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards. This is a fine, representative collection of what he's been up to. There's not another writer working that can so deftly capture and amplify the atmosphere of foreign settings and cultures, using the fantastic to achieve an effect of both utter realism and profound strangeness. You'll come away with a feeling of having understood current Russia, Iraq, Central America, and Africa, and, yes, Ground Zero on a visceral level. Amazing, eye-opening stuff.

Lucius Shepard's vision has transformative powers - both for his characters and for the reader. These masterfully crafted stories create highly individual worlds that are dark, fantastical, deeply human and always believable despite the surreal twists. You'll never see crocodiles and lizzards the same way after this - whether as agents of horror or kindred souls to lost humans, they are always mysterious manifestations of human rapaciousness, madness or loneliness.

You will go to the moral chaos of gangsterist Russia, the jungles of South America, Africa, a rather strange American prision, and the aftermath of 9/11. There is definitely a `fantastical' and dream-like streak in these stories, but not so much for fantasy's sake as in the sense that the boundaries of the real, the possible and the explicable are imaginatively stretched to reveal the horrors or mysteries that lie beyond. Unlike most `fantastical' or SF writing, this is fiction primarily concerned with people, places, and ideas. Lucius Shepard's grasp of foreign cultures and places is second to none in American fiction, and I dare say in English-language fiction. He makes writers far more famous than him seem dull and provincial.

I envy those about to discover this marvellous writer. If you hunger for more after you finish this, his novel A Handbook of American Prayer is likewise wild, brilliant and disturbing. His shorter novel Trujillo is a dark gem, and I'm about to chomp my way through the rest of his work. I'm addicted.

As with so much of his writing, here Shepard once again proves himself a poet who just happens to write in the genres of fantasy and sci-fi. That few of his stories tie up neatly just adds to their sense of a world unraveling, which seems to be a central theme of his work.

Stories like A Walk in the Garden, Crocodile Rock, The Drive-In Puerto Rico, Eternity and Afterward--heck, to tell the truth, all of them--are haunting in their descriptions of their protagonists' struggles against the unknown, entropy, injustice, the dissolution of themselves, or whatever else sparks Shepard's imagination, and it is his ability to make each character real that tinges each story with a kind of sadness that reaches down into the gut and wrenches, much like the best of, say, Russell Banks' or Stewart O'Nan's work.

It is his very power to move, perhaps, that caused the tempest in the teapot in Amazon's reviews about Only Partly Here, which I took as a elegy of what we all lost on that terrible day.

....And for what it's worth, I couldn't care less about the rants of sensitives regarding 9/11; I was in downtown Manhattan that day, and still it seems obvious to me that to insist that writers ignore moments of historical tragedy is to disregard the power and scope of many of history's greatest works--War and Peace, All Quiet on the Western Front, Night, and many others come to mind.

--And absolutely it is to distract us, potential readers, from the great and beautiful jewels of stories collected here.

For my sake, I just wish Mr. Shepard wrote faster, because I love his work and can't wait for his next novel or short story collection. Easily he's one of my favorite sci-fi/fantasy writers. After reading this collection, he may become one of yours as well.

This is a collection that is a bit more of a supernatural focus, I suppose, even if only a light element at times.

Eternity and Other Stories : Only Partly Here - Lucius Shepard
Eternity and Other Stories : A Walk In the Garden - Lucius Shepard
Eternity and Other Stories : Crocodile Rock - Lucius Shepard
Eternity and Other Stories : Hands up! Who Wants To Die? - Lucius Shepard
Eternity and Other Stories : The Drive-in Puerto Rico - Lucius Shepard
Eternity and Other Stories : Jailwise - Lucius Shepard
Eternity and Other Stories : Eternity and Afterward - Lucius Shepard

Annoyingly vague vaguely ghostly woman.

3.5 out of 5

Squad level hell.

4 out of 5

Yank bloke in Africa meets magic man, dreams of eating people. As a werecrocodile. Perhaps has evidence to be slightly worried about this when awake. As a consequence, decides on the intercontinental manoeuvre.

3.5 out of 5

Hillbilly hooks up, complications ensue when alien abductee FBI woman on the lam, hybrid lovechild and lover take a fancy to his girl and offer loot.

3.5 out of 5

Indigo lizard looms liminal.

3 out of 5

Arty prison transferee surprised by sexual mirror chameleons.

3.5 out of 5

Magic mafiya's dead dude disco.

4 out of 5

I am going to focus on the story in this collection entitled, "Only Partly Here".

I had thought that the only reactions to what happened to New York on Sept 11 were either to put it into a political context of aggression and violence against our homeland, or to see it as too incomprehensible to articulate at all.

Fortunately, I was wrong, and it turns out that short science fiction is the way to unpick what happened.

Ian McEwan has said that after 9/11, he avoided invented characters and wanted to go back to school and start to learn.

Lucius Shepard obviously doesn't feel this way as he jumped straight in and faced the challenge of articulating the experience of 9/11 through the superficially whimsical tale of a grad student and a ghost.

Other novelists were not so strong in their vision and commitment to this task. Jay McInerney for one said that like most novelists he went through a period of intense self-examination and self-loathing after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.

Another advantage to Lucius taking on this challenging subject matter in the tight constrictions of short fiction is that, as McInerney also says, he was incapable of reading a novel following the attack.

Lucius has also shown the courage of his convictions. Writing, indeed getting over a long slump in the 1990s, and keeping writing (unevenly perhaps) where other writers were distracted. Some worked as volunteers feeding national guardsman and rescue workers, or were right by Ground Zero and so went to bed at night behind police barricades and in the odor of acrid electric fires. Lucius was not there (as readers of his blog and movies reviews will know). But he didn't have to be. He took control of the situation, of the narrative of 9/11 if you will, from a distance. He was, like Bush, elsewhere at the exact moment, but that doesn't matter.

British and American authors (including Naipaul) have said that they agree with McEwan and that fiction seemed inadequate to the moment of a post-Sept 11 world.

The New York Times has said that novelists have failed to engage with the "post 9/11 era". Clearly, they have neglected to read science fiction (where Shepard is unfortunately ghettoized).

We live in a cultural gap, an era in 2005 that debates (again) whether the novel is dead, whether documentarists such as Morgan Spurlock and Michael Moore are the only artists able to make sense of the world, and where some argue that our novelists have yet to "weigh in" and "make sense" of the events of 9/11/2001 and 7/7/2005.

McInerney says that "it is to the novel that we turn to confirm our own senses and emotions to create narratives that reveal to us emotional truths. We desperately want to have McEwan or Delillo or Roth." Interestingly, he has also said that Mailer advised him that he should wait ten years before attempting a novel about 9/11. Mailer, the mainstream's own Lucius Shepard, counseled a slow and steady pace to analyze the vastness of the experience.

Lucius Shepard, as close readers of his high period in the 80s will know, is never slow and steady. He is an instinctive writer, and thus cannot analyze his own fictional processes. His vision of how to explain 9/11 relies on the art of the fantastical. Patrick McGrath's novella "Ground Zero" is a more complex story, and centers around a prostitute who lost a lover in the World Trade Center and is haunted by his ghost.

The psychiatrist treating the prostitute is eventually driven mad by the events she herself failed to witness. This is, of course, more attention-grabbing, it being a mainstream story published by a more widely read and more successfully established writer than a "genre" writer. Unfortunately, it is also the better-written and realised story. Shepard's is good, but in the wider understanding of 9/11 it pales beside McGrath. What McGrath also touches on, ironically, is that his is the story of mental illness brought about by being absent from the main event itself. According to the Electric Story website, Lucius wasn't in New York during the attack. He was in our homeland, however. He had gone to the movies.