Tough Guys

LIKE YOU'D UNDERSTAND, ANYWAY

By Jim Shepard

Knopf. 211 pp. $23

Jim Shepard's new collection of short stories leads off with two pages of acknowledgments in which he cites dozens of books, many of them obscure: Wild Flowers of Greece, The Oxford History of Australia 1770-1860, The Guillotine and the Terror, etc. He wants us to know that his tales have solid groundings in fact, that his imagination comes into play in such choices as which historical details to use and how to place his characters in authentic settings.

Thus in "My Aeschylus," we get a portrait of the Greek tragedian not as a playwright but as a warrior and brother, defending his homeland against the invading Persians. In "Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak," we get the ruminations of a high school football player on his and his teammates' brutal approach to the game. In "Sans Farine," we learn, almost against our will, myriad facts about why the guillotine was invented, how it worked ("In an eye-blink [the head] leapt seventeen or eighteen inches from the trunk"), and what it cost an executioner and his family for him to ply this scorned trade.

Shepard previously demonstrated his ability to enter into the minds of historical figures in his excellent novel Nosferatu (1998), about F.W. Murnau, who directed the silent horror movie of the same title. Something about grisly subject matter seems to stimulate this author; for me, at any rate, the executioner's story is the best of the lot. It's a brief tragedy about a man whom society virtually imprisons in his job (executioners and their kin formed a kind of French untouchable class) and whose beloved wife warns him that if he carries out his assignment to behead Marie Antoinette -- he's already done the king -- she may walk out on him.

In other stories, however, Shepard's prose can frustrate his intentions. The otherwise spot-on "Courtesy for Beginners," about a lousy summer camp experience, gets off to a bad start when the narrator, who is supposed to be 12, says, "I headed down the path toward the noise. I think I was affecting a saunter." I've never met a 12-year-old who would use such an arch phrase, even to himself. The diarist narrator of "The First South Central Australian Expedition," which takes place in 1840, writes in the short, terse sentences favored by American creative writing programs, rather than in the ornate style, rich in subordinate clauses, beloved of educated men and women in the 19th century.

Shepard's prose is capable of aphoristic power, as when his executioner sums up the most murderous stage of the French Revolution: "The solution for all national troubles was understood to be an unflagging austerity of purpose in the form of an evermore passionate embrace of ruthlessness." But I wish that, to help the facts he tracked down do the work laid out for them, he'd been more of a ventriloquist.

-- Dennis Drabelle,

a contributing editor of Book World.