CRAFT ESSAY #! - Shepard/Prose

Craft Essay #1:

Like You’d Understand, Anyway

via Reading Like a Writer

Words

While reading Jim Shepard’s story “The Zero Meter Diving Team,” having just read Francine Prose’s chapter on “Words” in Reading Like a Writer, I found myself underlining words and phrases like crazy: to bear up, crash cart, murderousness, tinted, colorations, enraged tenderness…. And these are just from the story’s first three pages! If Prose’s declaration that “language is the medium we use in much the same way a composer uses notes” is correct, then what kind of music is Shepard composing in this story? To me, it sounds like one of those modern Eastern European symphonies filled with jarring notes and strange percussion while still maintaining a pleasing, even catchy, melody.
While keeping our focus on words, let’s start with his decision to divide the story into separately titled sections. These titles range from the simple and explanatory (“Loss,” “That Warm Night in April”) to the mock Soviet intellectual (“The Individual Citizen in the Vanguard”). Like the words so carefully chosen in the story itself, these titles reveal the state of mind of the narrator, who has lost a brother to radiation poisoning after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster (another brother nearly died as well, and becomes an invalid). Boris is Chief Engineer of the Department of Nuclear Energy, and thus feels responsible for Mikhail’s death. As a scientist, he knows the lingo of that world (radionuclides, roentgens, etc.), but mostly his words communicate guilt, loss and anger. Shepard finds the correct balance between the two poles—the cold science and the hot emotion—through word choice. Let’s look at the opening paragraph (titled “Guilt Guilt Guilt,” a repetition later echoed by the dying Mikhail’s sarcastic “Tragedy tragedy tragedy”):
Here’s what it’s like to bear up under the burden of so much guilt: everywhere you drag yourself you leave a trail. Late at night, you gaze back and view an upsetting record of where you’ve been. At the medical center where they brought my brothers, I stood banging my head against a corner of a crash cart. When one of the nurses saw me, I said, “There, that’s better. That kills the thoughts before they grow.”

Boris begins with the poetic image of the guilty party “leaving a trail,” snail-like, wherever he “drags” himself. Still, the words are sturdy--to bear up, burden, drag, gaze—anchoring the metaphor to the page. Then we get the important information about the hospital and the poisoned brothers, and all of a sudden Boris is banging his head “against a corner of a crash cart.” That crash cart is key. The concussive sound of the words conveys all we need to know. Finally, there is that line of dialogue, spoken to the startled nurse. Boris has returned to the metaphorical and poetic (methinks Shepard has read Jesus’ Son), with the word kills embedded like a bomb.
Ka-boom.

Sentences

In Reading Like a Writer, Prose considers the long-flowing yet easily followed sentences of such masters as Samuel Johnson and Virginia Woolf, as well as the shorter, punchier sentences of Hemingway. Jim Shepard uses both styles, often within the same story. Check out the opening sentence of “Proto-Scorpions of the Silurium”:
It’s a crappy rainy morning in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and I’m home from seventh grade with a sore throat and my parents and brother are fighting and I’m trying every so often to stay out of it.

First, he presents a wonderful amount of information in this sentence. But let’s look at its construction. There are three connective and’s linking four potential sentences, with no commas separating them. This perfectly captures the young narrator’s state of mind as he deals (in present tense) with his dysfunctional family on a claustrophobic rainy day. It’s as though the narrator is on one of those unpleasant, exhausting carnival rides, the kind that leaves him queasy. Then comes the follow-up sentence: “Jonathan Winters is on Merv Griffin, doing his improv thing with a stick.” We now know the time frame (early ‘70s), and we get another glimpse at this kid’s jaded, precocious personality. A few paragraphs on, the overwhelmed boy tries another tack with a series of short declarative sentences:
My brother and I are playing 500 rummy. He’s kicking my ass. For a while I was kicking his. He’s quiet like he’s trying to concentrate. He hates when my father goes out of his way to do something for him.

Here we get the sense the narrator is trying to slam on the brakes of that nauseating carnival ride, or perhaps armoring up for some inevitable fracas (which, indeed, occurs). Later, just before all hell breaks loose, he creates a palpable feeling of unease with this killer: “He sits there with his eyes on me, setting one molar on another.” Reading this is like having the dental hygienist scrape some stubborn plaque off your teeth.
In what seems to be a companion story in the collection, “Courtesy for Beginners” (though the sibling birth order has been reversed, with the crazy brother now younger than the narrator), the teenage narrator opens with: “Summer camp: here’s how bad summer camp was.” (Notice the similarity to the opening line of “The Zero Meter Diving Team.”) Why the first two words and colon? Why not start with “Here’s how bad…”? For that matter, why not start with the following sentence, which begins “The day I arrived…”? But Shepard knows what he’s doing. This kid needs some distance from the red-hot nuclear core of the story (his loneliness, his alienation from his family and peers, his terror about his brother’s insanity), and this is achieved with a one-step-back approach. As I read the collection, I kept getting the impression that the author himself is working through his own heavy personal issues—a dangerous test tube full of unstable elements that requires distancing, which he achieves with these intricate sentences and other effects.
Finally, note how Shepard creates an authentic voice for this young boy with such sentences as “It was like 104.” The use of like and goes (instead of says) throughout the stories plants us firmly in the mind of a teenager.

Paragraphs

I loved the observation made by Rex Stout’s detective (as related in Reading Like a Writer) that a sentence’s implied meaning can change depending on whether it’s at the end of a paragraph or the beginning of a new one. This seems obvious, but when you read Shepard’s stories with this idea in mind, you pay closer attention as a reader and as a writer. In the story “The First South Central Australian Expedition,” the explorer narrator, recording his increasingly terrifying observations while on a doomed expedition into the outback, occasionally (and often unknowingly) signals a sense of dread not only through his choice of details but through his placement of those details in a paragraph. For example, in the entry dated “April 10,” the narrator summarizes a conversation he had earlier in the day with the other expedition officers about their complementary virtues. It’s an optimistic entry, written early in the journey, with the diarist clearly pleased by his choice of fellow explorers. At the end of this one-paragraph entry, he then includes the following sentence: “A short while after our discussion, one of the men shot what Mander-Jones informs us is a new sort of butcher-bird, very scarce and wild.” Leaving aside the symbolism of this weird bird and its demise (Coleridge’s albatross comes to mind), why on earth does this detail arrive at the end of the same paragraph as the cheery conversation? Why not give it its own paragraph? The author (Shepard) appears to be signaling to us (if not to his protagonist) that there is some sort of powerful link between the two. The reader is left less with an appreciation of the expedition’s personnel than with the taste of dead bird in his mouth.
Shepard goes for the opposite effect in the story “Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak.” The narrator, a high school football player, is talking about the sense of tradition his coach engenders, and how his vicious friend Wainwright is “the main upholder of that tradition as far as everybody else is concerned. Players for other teams: they’re wearing another color and they’re on his field. He takes it personally.” Then, a new paragraph: “I try to ride that wave but there are mean dogs and mad dogs, and it’s not that easy to make the leap.” Here, the narrator, recognizing that he may be mean but is not mad, separates himself from Wainwright by creating a new space—a new paragraph.

Narration

We cannot approach the topic of “Narration” without acknowledging the breathtaking scope of Shepard’s choice of narrators. There are themes to be found—troubled teens, doomed explorers, ancient Greeks and Romans, all of whom are struggling with family issues or the crush of history, or both. But, from a writer’s standpoint, what boggles the mind is the author’s magnificent devotion to authenticity. This is attained by the use of language (listen to the “Russian-y” placement of the prepositional clause in this sentence from “The Zero Meter Diving Team”: “Mikhail for a full year carried himself as though he’d been petrified by a loud noise”), by vivid details (from “My Aeschylus”: “The plain, empty of trees and left fallow for grazing, smells of the wild fennel that gives it its name”), combined with what could only have been an obsessive regimen of research.
In her chapter on “Narration” (which could also be called “Point of View”), Francine Prose poses the “problematic” question Who is listening to the story? She correctly observes that most writers focus much more on who is telling the story, while forgetting the listener. I find it interesting and charming that she had to “trick” herself into writing her early novels by having the narrator actually tell the story to another character—an old-fashioned framing device hardly ever used anymore.
Jim Shepard’s stories, all of which are composed in the first person, do not go so far as to contrive a storytelling situation (two people telling tales by a fire, or someone confessing to a priest or a cop or a shrink), but two of the eleven stories do make use of a journal format in which the “writer” tells his/her tale for the sake of posterity, and many of the other stories use techniques that create the sense of a storyteller with a definite listener in mind.
The “journal” stories (“The First South Central Australian Expedition” and “Eros 7”) are straightforward, dated entries revealing the day’s events. And because it also features titled sections, “The Zero Meter Diving Team” has the feel of a story constructed for the benefit of an audience (why else label those sections?). More challenging, if we’re looking to discern the “listener,” are the other tales, which we could easily surmise are addressed “out into the ozone,” as Prose puts it, but which do contain fascinating clues that the narrators are speaking to specific listeners. The narrator of “Hadrian’s Wall,” a scribe (aha!) for the Roman army in the fourth or fifth century, introduces himself—“I am Felicius Victor, son of Annius Equester”—the way one would if speaking to a listener. The same goes for “My Aeschylus,” which begins “I am Aeschylus son of Euphoion of Eleusis.” The sense of a predetermined listener is also implied by these narrators’ unusually frequent posing of questions (from “My Aeschylus”: “Who’s trained me? Who’s pruned my independence? Who’s stopped my mouth?”) and the relative sparseness of dialogue in favor of summary (another trait of oral storytelling).
Did Shepard consciously decide to construct these stories as if the narrators were telling tales to particular listeners? Did he need to trick himself, like Francine Prose, into getting permission to tell stories? I doubt it. But I do get the feeling that he consciously created distancing techniques in order to insulate his narrators from the crippling truths of their lives.
A dramatic example of this is in the collection’s concluding story, “Sans Farine,” which is told by an executioner during the aftermath of the French Revolution. Toward the end of the story, Sanson, overwhelmed by the desertion of his wife and numbed by the literal buckets of blood he is responsible for, reverts to the third person, as if he is unable to inhabit his own skin anymore. I was reminded of poor Bob Dole, who kept referring to himself in the third person while running for president in 1996. Here was a man who was not comfortable in the role of candidate and so needed to create for himself a separate, perhaps thicker-skinned, entity on the campaign trail. So, too, does Sanson the executioner split off from himself so as not to face head on (no pun intended!) what he’s unprepared to deal with. It is a beautiful and fitting way to conclude these stories, all of which are told to us by people who are on the edge in one way or another, but who so often are paralyzed by fate, so that, like the sad, lonely astronaut of “Eros 7,” they turn their backs on all the world has to offer.