BOOK REVIEW
Jim Shepard touches all bases with "Batting Against Castro"
BATTING AGAINST CASTRO. By Jim Shepard. Knopf. 224 pages. $22.Reviewed by Seth Rogovoy
(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Oct. 20, 1996) -- Some authors feel the need to insert themselves into their fictions, while others are content with the having created the illusion of something wholly separate from themselves. You can feel the presence of the former -- stylists like Martin Amis, Paul Auster and Philip Roth -- hovering throughout their plots, their characters, in the very words they choose, whereas the latter allow the needs of their individual narratives to dictate their style. Jim Shepard, the author of four previous novels, is an example of the latter type, which is made athletically obvious in "Batting Against Castro," the Williamstown author's new short-story collection featuring 14 stories whose range of style and subject matter is as astonishingly varied as winter-league baseball, German expressionist filmmaking, vulcanology, aerial warfare and teen angst.
Several of Shepard's tales place ordinary people in extraordinary situations. In the title story, two ballplayers trying to salvage their fading careers by playing winter baseball in Cuba find themselves in the whirlwind of a revolution, where they become the unwitting focus of a showdown between the dictator Batista and the renegade Castro.
The tacky banality of a road trip through Florida by a husband and wife with R.V. in tow is put into hard relief in "Atomic Tourism," wherein the sightseeing highlights are the remains of a crater- strewn, post-nuclear landscape.
In "Messiah," one of several stories that use organized sports as a motif, a college recruit finds himself lured into a web of violence and treachery at the hands of the title character. And the dream-like "Ida" uses the football field to render a surreal vision of family values that might have come out of the warped mind of Jack Kemp.
Shepard is a nimble interpreter of young minds. In "Eustace," a Catholic-school student locks the doors of his school in protest against what he sees as the disparity between the teachings of the nuns and the reality of an unjust world where adults do not practice what they preach. "Spending the Night with the Poor" is narrated by an upper-class high school student who is alternately fascinated and repelled by a friend from the other side of the tracks. Her curiosity and desire to "help" her friend gets the best of her when she winds up with a much deeper appreciation for her friend's life than she ever bargained for.
"Nosferatu" purports to be the journal-like notations of German filmmaker F.^W. Murnau during the making of that early horror classic. The story portrays a movie set much like that of today, where movies become finished products only in spite of the bickering among producers, actors, directors and technicians conspiring against the ultimate realization of their common goal. The short piece, "Who We Are, What We're Doing," showcases Shepard's fascination with lingo, in this case a first-person narration by a fighter pilot which says as much about the beauty and power of language itself as anything.
Shepard uses objects of obsession to frame psychological dramas. In "Mars Attacks," a collection of old, sci-fi trading cards functions as a bridge between estranged brothers. The brothers reappear in "Krakatau," this time as adults, wherein the simmering threat of the volcano functions as a metaphor for one brother's violent eruptions and the other's repressed fury.
In stories like these and others that use slight flights of fancy or that create wholesale new realities, Shepard illuminates the epiphanic moments that get overlooked in everyday life.
For Berkshire readers in particular, Shepard's volume comes with the added bonus of regional recognition: his stories are sprinkled with names and places including the Women's Exchange, the Artery Arcade, Greylock Animal Hospital, the Advocate newspaper and the Housatonic River.
Shepard's seemingly disparate fictions are united by the fertility of his imagination, the artfulness of his narratives, an uncanny eye for telling detail and compassionate characterizations. They are alternately witty and warm, sober and subversive, and infused with a deep and generous spirit. In the end, "Batting Against Castro" is a versatile effort from a verifiable virtuoso.
[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1996. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
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