Fiction’s realities

With stories involving famous rock bands, classic horror movies, even historic disasters, writer Jim Shepard has found a way to compete with the faster, flashier entertainments of today. But the question remains: What is the role of literature in a world that seems to have passed it by?

Such issues are never far from the mind of Shepard, who has recently published two new books: “Project X,” a novel, and “Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories,” a retrospective that highlights the depth of his imaginative world.

“One thing that can happen in fiction,” Shepard, 47, says by phone from Williamstown, Mass., where he teaches at Williams College and lives with his wife and three children, “is that, as writers and readers, we accept a narrative box that tells us we know where a piece of work is going. But I prefer to play with that a little bit.”

As an example, he cites the title story of his new collection, which involves a clandestine gay romance between two crew members on the Hindenburg and unfolds during the airship’s final voyage, a journey we all understand is doomed. “There’s an enormous imported dread here,” Shepard explains, “which is something I’ve always loved. It’s like seeing a movie that takes place on the Titanic. We know what’s going to happen, but then again, we really don’t.”

A good story operates on multiple levels at the same time, both collective and personal, large and small. In that sense, writing about a disaster like the Hindenburg can function as a kind of funhouse mirror, allowing us to take a familiar event and reinvent it, to imagine it anew.

In many ways, Shepard’s career has been one long exercise in reinvention, from the publication of his first novel, “Flights,” in 1983. In the two decades since, he’s written seven other books, many of which operate in a shadowy middle ground between history and invention, taking stories we think we know and recasting them, until they reveal new facets of themselves.

His best-known novel, “Nosferatu,” is a fictionalized portrait of the German expressionist filmmaker F.W. Murnau, who directed the iconic vampire movie of the same name. He was a subject to whom Shepard was attracted, at least in part, because “Murnau’s family has tightly controlled access to information about him, so there are these enormous gaps.” For Shepard, such gaps are like tiny bits of narrative ore, full of possibility -- if they can be mined. The same is true of many of the stories in “Love and Hydrogen,” which invoke historical figures and situations as a way of bringing unexpected characters to life.

“Descent Into Perpetual Night,” for instance, personalizes the figure of William Beebe, who invented the bathysphere, while “Krakatoa” uses a naturalist’s obsession with the Krakatoa volcano as a metaphor through which to explore his brother’s emotional instability, which is marked by eruptions of a far more personal sort.

Inside an apocalyptic mind

Of all Shepard’s work, perhaps none blends fact and fiction more controversially than “Project X,” which describes a Columbine-style school shooting from the inside; the novel is narrated by Edwin Hanratty, one of the kids involved. Yet rather than sensationalize the material, Shepard manages to make us sympathetic, by slowly itemizing the degradations of Edwin’s eighth-grade life.

“What I wanted to do,” he says, “was to give a glimpse of the kind of mind that finds everything apocalyptic. With kids this age, it’s like they’re at a crossroads every 20 minutes. They have no perspective, which is what makes everything so dire.”

Perspective or not, Edwin is a kid in trouble, buffeted by malevolence at every turn. What’s remarkable about the novel is how it portrays him as less despairing than disconnected, which makes his friendship with Flake, the book’s most menacing character, more bad fortune than anything else.

“I turn over his dad’s nine-millimeter,” Edwin tells us, “which looks like something a secret agent would use. Its clip is heavier than a rock that size. Flake’s looking at it too. We both just look at it for a few minutes. I’m still thinking about changing clips. ‘Think we’re really gonna do this?’ I go.”

The point, Shepard believes, is that events -- even disastrous ones -- are not inevitable but evolve out of a constantly shifting stew of circumstance, which is what the novel seeks to track.

“Edwin,” Shepard says, “is ethically passive. I write about characters like that because it’s an easy way to implicate the reader but also because I’m interested in how people get involved in things without making conscious decisions of any kind.”

As for the story’s motivation, he insists that he was not looking to make a statement, because this is not what fiction does. Although he did spend a few weeks sitting in on junior high school classes “to make sure things hadn’t improved dramatically,” “Project X” is more or less “autobiographical in sensibility and voice.”

Neither is it the first time Shepard has taken on such material; stories like “Eustace,” with its futile Catholic school rebellion, or “Glut Your Soul on My Accursed Ugliness,” whose protagonist seems almost like a prototype of Edwin, record the subtle (and not-so-subtle) brutalities of adolescence in a direct and moving way. As Shepard puts it: “I’m always linking childhood and catastrophe.”

Of the 22 pieces in “Love and Hydrogen,” half a dozen slip the bounds of traditional fiction altogether, like children’s fantasies gone awry. “The Creature From the Black Lagoon” recasts the 1950s monster classic from the perspective of the creature, while “Mars Attacks” tells the story of a boy and his brother by describing the science-fiction trading cards they collect. These, Shepard admits, are “higher-risk stories” -- because they challenge standard definitions of literature and because, in relying so heavily on pop culture, they hazard collapsing under their own gimmickry.

“Pop culture riffs,” Shepard says, “are part of these stories, but that only goes so far. You need more than a riff to keep up interest. There has to be character, empathy.” The same is true of “John Ashcroft: More Important Things Than Me,” a collage of actual statements by the attorney general that casts him as unexpectedly human, or “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” in which a fictionalized John Entwistle spends 15 years lusting after Keith Moon’s wife.

A writerly kinship

“He’s writing about serious issues,” notes Michael Chabon, who featured Shepard in his “McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales” anthology. “But he’s doing it in a way that sneaks up on people. It’s a brilliant idea, because there’s still an air of the forbidden about using pop culture in serious art.”

There is, of course, another reason why using pop culture as the subtext of one’s fiction is a risky business -- it can marginalize your work. Certainly, this has been something of the case with Shepard; other than “Project X” and “Love and Hydrogen,” all his books are out of print.

“Why is he not better known?” novelist Ron Hansen, a friend for more than 20 years, asks rhetorically. “Some of it is just bad luck. ‘Paper Doll’ ” -- here, he cites Shepard’s 1986 novel about a World War II American bomber squad stationed in England -- “came out just before the movie ‘Memphis Belle,’ which dealt with similar material and overwhelmed the book.”

More to the point is Shepard’s inability to be categorized, the way he willfully defies the boundaries by which so much of our culture is defined. He’s neither a realist nor a fantasist, neither an autobiographical author (in the strictest sense) nor one who writes exclusively about the outside world.

“It’s no mystery at all why I’m obscure,” Shepard says, his voice a mix of irony and resignation. “The classifiability issue is hugely to my detriment. I’m hard to put into bullet points.”

An ‘incredible range’

The paradox is that even as this has kept him from a wider readership, it’s what makes him interesting, since you never know what he’ll come up with next. “Certainly,” says Chabon, who thinks of Shepard as a literary kindred spirit, “he’s extremely difficult to pigeonhole. That works against an artist in any form. But there’s so much to him as a writer, so much more than just his use of pop tropes. He’s got incredible range. In fact, it’s almost as if he’s creating his own mini-genre. He can do everything. He can be serious, comic, dark, nostalgic; he never seems to repeat himself.”

Shepard, then, is a writer who, along with a small group of contemporaries, is reconfiguring how fiction works. It’s about time, for, as Shepard points out, “there are plenty of stories about marriages breaking up, but, while I appreciate that, there has to be something that makes me care.” Shepard doesn’t mean this as a judgment, not exactly; “Love and Hydrogen,” after all, opens with his own version of such a story, “The Gun Lobby,” in which an unhappy wife takes her husband hostage in their home. For him, though, what’s at issue is the angle, the way his narratives emerge in three dimensions until they explode off the page.

“Why put these people in that situation?” he asks. “Partly, it has to do with where my interests lie. It’s like the story ‘Krakatoa,’ which was inspired by my brother’s mental illness. Why bring up a volcano? In some sense, it’s a way of seducing myself. My heart sinks at the notion of mental illness. But a volcano is cool.”