Boys Town by Jim Shepard, review

Jim Shepard is an American author whose works have been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's and Playboy, to name a few.  In 2008, his short story collection Like You'd Understand, Anyway, won the Story Prize and was nominated for a National Book Award.  Boys Town is from the short story collection You Think That's Bad.

Boys Town, which ran in the November 8, 2010, issue of The New Yorker, is the story of a man who just never measures up.  The reader follows the narrator as he struggles to pull together his tatters of a life.  He is a 39 year old war veteran who lives with his mother, who doesn't understand his personality, and who is divorced with a child he pays support for but is only allowed to see twice a year, at most.   His father walked out on the family when he was in the third or fourth grade.  He struggles to form any kind of relationship that doesn't have some deep-rooted tension.   Even his ex-wife complains about him to his mother, and his mother complains back.

There is a statement made by the narrator's mother about him possibly having a mental illness ["I think you got that thing they talk about on the news [...] P.T.S.D. Is that what it is?  I think you need to talk to somebody" (73)], but this isn't a story about mental illness so much as someone who's lost.  Maybe someone who's even been broken by the world.  Someone who's lonely, bitter, defeated, ganged up on, and who lets it happen because he seeks solace in isolation, whether in the woods or in his mind, so he doesn't have to take action.   When he does take action it borders on abusive, probably due to his pent up emotions and inability to get anyone to listen unless he does something drastic.

There are references made to the 1938 movie "Boys Town," the one thing that the narrator's mother had kept from her marriage.  References such as, "'Well, I'm nothin',' And the kid says right back, 'Then you can continue being nothin'.  And nobody cares,'" and, "'And when Tracy has to tell him that he doesn't have anything else, the kid goes, 'I thought you said that if we were good, somebody would help us.''  The movie seems to act as a self-reference, like the narrator can't relate to anyone in the world but the kids in that movie.  Father Flanagan built the orphanage Boys Town and let the kids determine the rules. Like the narrator, the kids were on the outskirts of society; however, someone in that story was kind enough to give them a voice.

The ending where he fires shots at his girlfriend's house and then hides from the cops I think is either a metaphor for how isolation leads to delinquency or maybe for what kind of actions it takes in this world to get attention sometimes.  Given the Boys Town references to work with, it seems plausible.

I loved this story.  I don't enjoy reading short stories very often but I made it through this one happily.  I liked the style of it, the interior monologue was quick and semi-circular.  One weakness was maybe the ending which seemed to pull quickly from lack of action to an act of defiance, but given the context it's completely understandable.  

I felt sympathy for the narrator, which is hard for me to feel for characters.  I'm not really sure if he is to be sympathized for or if he's someone that is "lazy," which makes him unsympathetic, but then we find out he's really a prisoner of his own thoughts and paralyzed due to self-consciousness, which I feel does make him sympathetic.  Every time I wanted to feel less sympathy for him, we'd find out how sympathetic he is or how hard he's tried.  I thought that worked really well.