Customer Reviews

Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
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This is the best short fiction collection I've read in several years. Shepard's stories are both economical and lean--there isn't much here that's over 20 pages long, but Shepard packs into those 20 pages a complexity of theme and character that most writers can't approach even at novella length. It is a dizzying collection, by turns violent, funny, and wrenchingly sad. Shepard writes in a dazzling array of voices, handling each with effortless authority. He is particularly good at adolescents (see also the amazing Project X), but these stories also give voice to a Yugoslav football player, a German test pilot, John Entwhistle, John Ashcroft, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Superb.

Reading Jim Shepard's `Love and Hydrogen' right after Adam Haslett's overwrought and over-rated `You Are Not a Stranger Here' was what I needed to re-affirm my faith in short fiction as an art form. As a reader I want a fulfillment of what fiction promises: a mimesis; that the author will try to inhabit other lives and situations and render them in a way that produces something novel for me. I don't need self-affirmation or a lesson. I want a story. And in a short story collection I want stories. Many times, such as in Haslett's book, the situations are so repetitive that you suspect that the author is rendering his own life through these stories, that self-indulgence and egotism over-ride art or any interest in art. Sorry for writing of my opinion of Haslett's work, but it brought into stark contrast why I liked this collection so much more.

Shepard's work is most notable for its incredible diversity of setting, voice and theme: a teen-age girl's first person account of a friendship strained by class division (Spending the Night With the Poor), the disaffections and fascination of a Yugoslav footballer in progressive 1960's Holland (Ajax is All About Attack), the thrill and resignation of a World War II German test pilot (Climb Aboard the Mighty Flea) are just a sample. He can approach a story as a straight ahead narrative (The Mortality of Parents) or as an ironic romp(The Creature from the Black Lagoon) and yet he always seems to find his way to the dark heart of the story. He is at his best when he takes on narratives or personae that we think we know and produces something startlingly fresh: `We Won't Get Fooled Again' a brief history of The Who from the eyes of their most enigmatic member, bassist John Entwhistle, is hilarious and heart-rending.

Nor is Shepard ideologically bound; in his exceptional story `John Ashcroft: More Important Things Than Me' he paints a self-portrait of the man that is at once more generous and chilling than any number of partisan biographies could hope to accomplish. Characters who would be no more than walk-ons or caricatures in another writer's story take centre-stage with Shepard, and you get the feeling that no character is automatically invested with more insight or dignity than any other. In all, it is a refreshing approach and one that declares a fuller, more humanistic artistic vision than ninety percent of the reheated autobiographies that masquerade as fiction today. The only weak point I found in the collection was `Alicia and Emmet with the 17th Lancers at Balaclava' where the interweaving narratives felt somewhat strained. It is a minor drawback, like a complaint about the scuff-marks on Fred Astaire's floor.

At first this incredible array of voices and settings may seem like a self-conscious tour de force, that the author is trying to keep you on your heels with off-speed pitches because he doesn't have any real `stuff', but the writing is so good and the voice so authentic that the novelty of reading a story about something other than domestic conflicts seems secondary. I was thinking for a word to describe this work, which reads like an anthology of great writing, and I could only come up with fearlessness, that Shepard has no fear, and that alloyed with his skill and curiosity and utter decency as an artist, he has given us a work of depth and intelligence and beauty. Here's the last paragraph of the final story in the collection ­'Climb Aoard the Mighty Flea' where a World War II German pilot, knowing a horrific war has already been lost, straps himself into the first rocket powered fighter plane,

'No one's speaking. Our ears are on the slipstream. Our thumbs are on the cannon triggers. Our hearts are in the dive. We have become the inexplicable. We have beome the unbelievable. We are our own descendants, the children we have always wanted to be.'

Wow.

I thought Love and Hydrogen was incredible. His spectacularly detailed description of the Hindenburg and his use of history as a backdrop was terrific. I also loved the one about the explorer and the giant shark.

Jim Shepard is a marvel. He and George Saunders and Ken Kalfus are the kind of writers who make you want to sweep everything off your desk and apply for a job as assistant manager at the local Dairy Queen. Aesthetically, they make no mistakes, the scope and diversity of their work dazzles.

LOVE AND HYDROGEN displays scope and diversity all right: in spades. The stories transit spans of time, the subject matter encompassing everything from the final flight of the Hindenberg to the Creature From the Black Lagoon. To my mind, any number of these tales could be included in an anthology of the finest writing of the past fifty years. I've read that Shepard's research is meticulous and that is evident in historical reconstructions like the title story, `The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich', `Krakatau', `Batting Against Castro', etc.

There's a shiver of authenticity present in all of his fiction, an emotional honesty that defies sentiment and still manages to be heart-wrenching. No one in Jim Shepard's universe is blameless, everyone complicit; perhaps it's his version of original sin. We quickly recognize ourselves in Jim Shepard's peerless short stories and novels and that (among numerous other things) is what makes him so great.

I think Isaiah Berlin's classification of writers as hedgehogs (those who have one great theme) and foxes (those who have many themes) can be a useful classification of writers. Jim Shepard is definitely a fox. In this collection, Love and Hydrogen, much like last year's Pulitzer Prize nominated collection Like You'd Understand is a dizzying array of original and inventive stories. There are quirky tales of dysfunctional families: "gun lobby," "Runway," and "The Morality of Parents." He has a number of sports related stories, some of which infuse historical events into them like "Batting Against Castro" (about baseball and politics in pre-revolution Cuba) as well as "Ajax Is All About Attack" (which is about 60s politics in The Netherlands and soccer). One of Shepperd's greatest strengths is the adolescent coming of age story: "Mars Attacks," "Glut Your Soul On My Accursed Ugliness," "and "Spending The Night With The Poor." It is also apparent that Shepperd often infuses his stories with scientific or historical research: gay Nazis in love in a zeppelin ("Love and Hydrogen"), WWII battles behind occupied lines ("The Assassination of Reinhard Heydad"), deep sea exploration ("descent into Perpetual Night") and exploration of uncharted lands ("Astounding Stories") to name a few of his forays into history and science. I'd like to read one of his novels and see how he manages to sustain a story into a longer narrative.

These stories are fascinating and captivating. Within this one book you are intimately guided through such disparate worlds as the Hindenburg's last voyage and the crew's forbidden love affair and the amazon jungle and the Creature from the Black Lagoon and his eons of lonliness.This is my favorite book to give to people with a wicked sense of humor. Its equally funny and compassionate, perfect to feed bizarre nighttime dreams.

Story collections which hover around the same setting can sometimes work, but I'm much keener on those which hop throughout time and space to transport the reader to somewhere new and different with every story. The twenty-two stories collected here have all (except for one) previously appeared in various glossy magazines, literary journals, and even Shepard's previous book "Batting Against Castro." I had never read him until picking up his excellent novel Project X last year, and was so impressed with his ability to capture voice that I had to track this down. And wow, what a dazzling array of voices are represented here! Among the protagonists are: Attorney General John Ashcroft, Who bass player John Entwistle, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Czech WWII partisans, German WWII test pilots, oceanographer William Beebe, an explorer/adventurer from the 1920s, a weak-hitting baseball player in the 1950s, a Serbian soccer player in the 1960s, a few obsessed academics, an assortment of dysfunctional adults and kids, and in the title story, a gay crewman aboard the Hindenberg zeppelin.

A number of the stories feel like Shepard read an interesting work of non-fiction, and then decided to use his reading as the basis for a story. Not coincidentally, many of these were among my favorites, due to their especially strong sense of place. These include: the gay crewman's furtive relationship aboard the Hindenberg (background material drawn from the illustrated book Inside the Hindenberg) in the title story, the aesthetics of Dutch soccer circa 1966 (which draws very very heavily upon a book I have read, David Wimmer's study of Dutch soccer, Brilliant Orange) in "Ajax is Always on the Attack", the moral dilemmas of "The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich" (which draws from Jan Weiner's long out of print The Assassination of Heydrich), the fatalism of the early jet fighter test pilots in "Climb Aboard the Mighty Flea" (which draws upon Mano Zeigler's also out of print Rocket Fighter), and the story of William Beebe's historic descent of half a mile into the Atlantic (drawn from Beebe's also out of print memoir, Half Mile Down) in "Descent into Perpetual Night" in a "bathysphere" (which I think is on exhibit either at the Smithsonian Museum or the National Geographic Society headquarters, both in Washington, DC). There's a definite sense that Shepard is interested in the mysteries the universe holds-in addition to the the tale of Beebe's descent, there's an old-fashioned tale of a a man setting out to find a great shark in "Astounding Stories", not to mention the story told from the point of view of a primordial "Creature from the Black Lagoon."

The other major theme is the American family and the alienation within it. Not subject matter I'm typically a huge fan of, but Shepard usually imbues it with an interesting quirk or angle. In "The Gun Lobby", an ultra-passive husband is held hostage by his gun-toting wife as a SWAT team closes in. In "Mars Attacks", an adult looks back at his troubled relationship with his mentally imbalanced brother through a series of collectable cards (which were the basis for the film of the same name). In "Runway", a father takes nightly walks and sometimes sneaks onto a local airfield to lie on the runways as the planes lands. In "Krakatau", another adult man reflects on his mentally unbalanced brother. In "Won't Get Fooled Again", the "quiet one" in The Who reflects on his place within the wild family that is his band. Shepard also writes very well about the intersection of sports and politics -- in addition to "Ajax is Always on the Attack", there is "Batting Against Castro". This excellent story follows two light-hitting Philadelphia Phillies in the 1950s as they travel down to play for a Winter league team in Cuba.

Not every story worked for me -- I didn't care for "Glut Your Soul On My Accursed Ugliness" (about a kid in a disintegrating family), "Eustace" (about a semi-rebellious kid), "Reach for the Sky" (about a teenager working at a dog shelter), "Alice and Emmett with the 17th Lancers" (about a selfish academic husband and father), "The Mortality of Parents" (about an out of control pair of brothers and their dying father), "Spending the Night with the Poor" (about an adolescent girl who becomes friends with a much poorer girl), "John Ashcroft" (a series of satirical homey sayings), "Messiah" (about a college football player's bizarre friendship with a star teammate), and "Piano Starts Here". But even most of these had a kernel or two worth stumbling across and are well written. Overall , it's a collection that will rewards readers looking for a diverse set of voices and a strong sense of place.

the problem, for me, with jim shepard is that he has what seems to be *exactly* the right idea. his clinametic efforts to avoid the rote american short story are frequently spectacular, at least in scope, and possibly worth the price of admission in and of themselves; he offers short stories set on the hindenburg, in the secret test pilot camps of the luftwaffe; he offers a mini-bio of the who as narrated by john entwistle himself. he couldnt try harder to do something new and spectacular with the short story form, and even a reader who perceives a certain strain on these stories should at least appreciate the audacity and the effort.

at first glance, shepard seems ready to join george saunders and aimee bender at the top of the short fiction pigpile (a pile whose quality drops off precipitously close to the top). however, there are far more failures than successes in this collection. in fact, some of shepard's more successful pieces are those free of the historical baggage that weigh down the marquee pieces. this is not to say that they are formally complacent; the one true home run in the collection, "mars attacks" is as good as a good saunders, and features a novel formal conceit that actually works. in it, a narrator reconstructs his relationship with his mentally unstable brother as he examines a richly significant relic of their childhood--the "mars attacks" card collection that they worked on together. the story is brilliant, rich with nostalgia and sorrow. occaisonal practitioners of the intentional fallacy such as myself will probably speculate that the story features a more direct vein of autobiography than the others in the collection.

this is probably necessary reading for people interested in writing short fiction of their own, because what shepard is doing is important, even necessary. its always a good read, even at its less affecting. it remains troubling, however, that shepard has managed to fill his stories with so much color, history, humor, and imagination, but with so little of life.

....No "H"! I'll save my other comments for when I read the book, but as a loyal Who fan I had to point out the litte mistake in the Booklist review. I can't wait to read this book because I am in awe of those who can skillfully write in multiple narratives, and this book has intriguing characters. Hopefully the author spells "Entwistle" correctly. :)