Life During Wartime, by Lucius Shepard **7/8

I started reading this without realizing it, as the first quarter of this book is also a novella called "R&R" in Shepard's collection, The Jaguar Hunter. I was about halfway through TJH's version of "R&R" (which is about halfway through TJH) when, for some reason, I think because I had glanced at a couple of pages in Life During Wartime before I bought it just to get a sense of the book, I realized that the character in "R&R" also existed in LDW. I'm actually kind of surprised that it occurred to me, because I had only briefly glanced at LDW a few weeks earlier, but fortunately I did. So after finishing "R&R" in TJH, I switched over to the novel, which was a strange experience. I guess I've never really spent too much time thinking about the importance of the book as information vessel, though I've resisted reading short stories online because I know that will be a lesser experience. And I've certainly come to realize a few things about how I like my books to feel (not too big and bulky, though substantial), what size font I prefer (medium to small), and certainly the locations for reading (with a good lamp to provide mellow, yellow lighting, in a good chair). But I've never had the experience of switching from one type of book to a completely different one in the middle of reading the same book, and it was kind of strange. The makeup of the book contributed to this as well, since the end of "R&R" is really the end of a story, which is simply restarted anew in LDW. Quite clearly, Shepard wrote the story and then decided to expand it into a novel. The result is that "R&R" felt like a completed work, and then all of a sudden I was reading a different story about the same character in another book right afterwards, but starting about 90 pages in. Even at the conclusion of the book, I think of "R&R" as belonging to TJH, while the remaining three sections of LDW exists in their own shell. In fact, I feel a bit strange evaluating LDW, because I almost feel like I cheated it by not reading the first 90 pages along with the rest of the book, even though I read them immediately back to back. It's a sense of completeness that's missing, probably exacerbated slightly by the way Shepard really puts this novel together almost as four connected novellas. Really, it's just one story, but there are big time gaps between the some of the sections, and "R&R" really could stand on its own, as could most of the other sections of the book.

So all of this is to say that I liked Life During Wartime, but it was lacking in one of the things I've come to love about Shepard, namely the sense of the ethereal that I've found in many of the other stories in TJH and certainly in Kalimantan and Two Trains Running, which are the other books of Shepard's I've read at this time. My general feelings about Shepard still apply - great writing, good characters, emotional involvement, interesting situations - but it's just a bit of a more is less scenario. I'm sure Shepard could write a great novel, but I don't think this is it. It's a good novel, to be sure, but by fleshing out some of the strange ideas that he hinted at in the novella, Shepard actually takes away some of the mystery. I have no regrets about reading it in any case, as I'm confident that I'll read all of Shepard's work at this point (joining Wolfe in that regard as authors whose works I plan to read all of). But it was bizarre to have started reading it without realizing it - I'm just lucky that I had already purchased this book so that once I had started it, I was able to make the switch to finish the book in one fell swoop before returning to read the rest of the TJH.
(Summer 2006)

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