Shepard, Jesse. Jubilee King: Stories. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2003. 224 pp.

The mini-dramas of Jesse Shepard’s Jubilee King, which share an affinity for anti-climax with soap operas and mega-feminism, feed off of the modern angst of Malus Americanas. Shepard’s protagonists want, desperately, to be fully male, but in effect spin their wheels in an increasingly antagonistic social construct.

Like that damned Faulkner, Shepard carries on the wondrous syntactical tradition of using commas like duct tape to piece together strands of thought (and thus enlightening writing school students across the nation). The difference is that Faulkner would, at least, construct paragraphs that morphed scene and consciousness into a whole picture; Shepard just likes to write truncated, run-on sentences that sound, sort of, like people talking. So the reader encounters punctuated constructions like these:
     Their thinness and height were identical and equally extreme, no one could ever get their names straight. They reflected each other’s manner in every      movement; functioning with a lean toward work that suggested a belief in better things down the road. (34)

That perplexing paradox of punctuation (textus interruptus) could be a symbol that relates to the role switching modern males face in the land of advancing women. Unlike Faulkner’s shrewd men, Shepard’s characters face a wide world of failure with a growing sense of social confusion. The story quoted above, “Night Shot,” uses the inane business behind making movies as a metaphor for male frustration. Two grips, Cecil and Nick, can’t understand why their horses, who belong in the Southwest, rate below considerations for a Kodiak bear that will be used, somehow, in a scene in a desert plain:
     “It’s a movie Nick. They’re making a movie.”
     “I know that. That’s exactly what’s wrong with the whole deal. You got to believe in it right? Isn’t the whole point to make something you can believe,      make it seem possible?” (37)

The males’ identification with horses—especially one, they say, that can tell when a woman is menstruating—runs counter to the feminine appeal that romanticizes their wildness while celebrating their taming. These guys identify with the integrity of asteed’s purpose: to sense, mate, feed, and run, with original energy. Some things are always real and shouldn’t be messed with.

One of those things is the need for women to see men as integral as men see them. In one story, “In the Open,” a husband of a work-centered wife takes on housewife tasks and worries about her reaction to his own work hours being cut. To fill the time (while keeping the job change secret), he volunteers to be “found” by dogs that are being trained, by a female. The dog he encourages and challenges the most is also female. He imagines being found by the gregarious pup, whom he cradles in glad reunion. Later, he pathetically attempts to force his wife to react to his presence with similar élan. That man’s dilemma is contrasted with the horse lover in the title story who spends evening after evening searching for a significant female whose DNA will piece together a broken life.

The stalwart misery of Jesse Shepard’s men made me want to find a ZZ Top CD and play it at loud volume, just to get the hormones flowing. This is a male book that just might be good for females to read and consider, while the forces of society constrain to bury the male id and replace it with faux femininity.

Jeff Cebulski