The two gay engineers on the Hindenburg mirror the soccer-playing Slav in “Ajax is All About Attack” and the hapless Yanqui baseball players duffing it in the Cuban leagues in “Batting Against Castro.” A newcomer to the Shepardian oeuvre might find “Love and Hydrogen’s” conflation of Weimar decadence, burgeoning Nazism, a homosexual love affair and a terrible disaster odd, and far too open-ended. “Love and Hydrogen” takes place in a common Shepardian milieu: a land overshadowed by mid-twentieth century global politics, in the midst of which characters blithely attempt to ignore the troubling machinations steadily engulfing their world. The title story, which has drawn Eggers’s special notice, firmly belongs to the latter sphere. Some of Shepard’s stories do create a self-contained, finite universe, but many undeniably require a larger conceptual knowledge of Shepard’s preoccupations to fully cohere. Not only does Shepard imbue his tales with an arid, laconic style, he also populates them with distinct characters and seeds weighty, often interconnected themes throughout. But to lump his work in with the fluttery exhibitionism of the McSweeney’s school (remember Lemon?) would be a substantial mistake.

Certainly, there should be no argument that Shepard falls far from the Updike/Cheever school of meditative realism in the literary horseshoe pit. Yet those who criticize (or outright avoid) Shepard because of such boardwalk exhibitionism miss the point, just as surely as those who praise him for it. “stories about dissolving marriages are fine, but about two gay engineers on the Hindenburg?” (italics in original).

I quote from Eggers’s blurb for the short story collection Love and Hydrogen, recently out in paperback, which appears on the back flap of the new novel Project X: Such showy tactics have attracted praise from the likes of Dave Eggers, who-though he has shown himself capable of strong writing and good taste-still falls prey to the lure of a good gimmick. All of these seem like the lunging efforts of a flashy, horribly obnoxious creative writing student, bent on shocking his peers at the workshop table and drawing the eye of his foxy graduate assistant teacher. Consider the synopses of some of his recent stories: a family history related through a series of the old “Mars Attacks” cards an imagining of the Creature from the Black Lagoon’s last moments, as told by the swamp thing itself a slice of life, from The Who’s glory days, as recounted by John Entwhistle. At least in the metaphorical sense, Jim Shepard does not look good on paper.

Project x by jim shepard