"I don't think I'm ready to get married," says the narrator of the latter story. "But the minute I said it I thought, But I do want to be buried with her." That's a key line, all the more so when we consider that it comes from a soldier pinned down in an Indonesian jungle in the fiercest days of World War II. What he is saying, after all, is that there's something safer, something more containable about the stillness of the grave than the entanglements of a living relationship. It's a brutal notion, and perhaps nowhere does Shepard investigate it more relentlessly than in "Classical Scenes of Farewell," the story of a young servant to the 15th century French madman Gilles de Rais, who narrates his confession before his execution for helping his master mutilate and kill 142 young boys. "God will come to know our secrets," he tells us. "At our immolation He'll appear to us and pour His gold out at our feet. And His grace that we kicked away will become like a tower on which we might stand. And His grace will raise us to such a height that we might glimpse the men we aspired to be."
'You Think That's Bad': Book review
In his latest, Jim Shepard leads his characters — and his readers — right up to the point of obliteration, leaving us exhilarated and despairing at once.
You can read that declaration in a number of ways: as a statement of transcendence, or of delusion, or as a little bit of both. Regardless, it is fundamentally human — contradictory, full of bravado, clinging to hope when there is no reason (was there ever?) to be hopeful anymore. In such a context, it matters less what a character has done than where he finds himself, how even facing the limits of his own morality and endurance he can't help but reach out for the promise of possibility. "'What are you really looking for?' my wife said to me, last thing, before I left," recalls the narrator of "Low-Hanging Fruit," who works as a theoretical physicist. "What we're all looking for. That saving thing, I think: something that right now is beyond our ability to even imagine."
