Tim loaned me a copy of Tales of the Peacetime Army, by John Sheppard, and I was eager to see what Mr. Sheppard had come up with this time (after Small Town Punk, which I really dug). Upon receipt of said copy, I was even more intrigued by the book design and layout — it’s made to look like some sort of manual one might receive while in the armed forces.
I finished the book about fifteen minutes ago, and I’m really confused right now, the reasons for which I’ll elaborate on further down.
The book itself is either brilliant or boring, depending on your perspective. If it’s just a fictional novel written in the first person to tell the story of a portion of the narrator’s life, then I have to confess that it’s not all that exciting. The story itself is not particularly thrilling, and there isn’t really any grand twist or moral lesson or heartstring-tugging episode that deeply resonated with me. If, as I said, I was looking at it as a fictional tale. Which I was, based largely on the paragraph inside the cover, right below the copyright notice, that says:
This is a work of fiction. It’s all made up. Honestly. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
[Side note -- I couldn't help but notice the missing Serial Commas in the above paragraph. But I digress.]
However, once I finished, I immediately wanted to learn a little bit more about Mr. Sheppard. And I discovered that he was in the Army. And he did serve in the first Gulf War. And he did have a buddy named Murphy. And he did engage in certain drunken hijinks. All of which were recounted in the book. So despite that paragraph inside the front cover, I don’t think this was a work of fiction, but was rather at least semi-autobiographical. In which case I think it’s kind of brilliant.
The reasons for its brilliance may seem a little weird, but I’ll try to explain. All of the reasons why I said that it wasn’t a particularly great work of fiction are exactly why it’s a great work of nonfiction. Sheppard is a very talented writer, as evidenced by Small Town Punk, but this book looks to me, in retrospect, like he purposely tried to write it like a guy who wasn’t really that handy with the English language or writing (despite the fact that the narrator is apparently way too smart for his station in life, as borne out by the story).
It’s written almost like a diary would be written by a twenty-one year-old college dropout, or like the transcript of the deposition of said dropout. Short sentences. Very fact-focused, without any flights of prose. Matter-of-fact use of army vernacular and acronyms that neither I nor any other reader who hadn’t served time in the armed forces would understand, but with no effort to explain what they meant. And that’s what’s so cool about it — in my opinion, this book was written precisely to come off that way, and Sheppard succeeds brilliantly. It’s kind of like a professional athlete trying to throw a game; it’s harder than it looks, and it can take a great deal of effort to not play very well.
Who knows. Maybe I’m trying to put a positive spin on things after being relatively disappointed in the story that unfolded in the book. But given how short the book is and what an easy read it is (in spite of all the acronyms that I didn’t understand), coupled with the cool book design, I think it’s worth the effort to see if you can guess the story behind the story and what was driving Sheppard to write this book.
Books, Happenings | Tim | 
February 14, 2008 12:05 pm | 
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