Paper Doll

by Jim Shepard

A group of young fighters in the U.S. Air Corps awaits each day's dangerous combat by sharing their dreams and fears while creating new--and possibly short-lived--friendships

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Novels, War, Aviation

Mass Market Paperback

Published March 1, 1988

About the author

Jim Shepard is the author of seven novels, including most recently The Book of Aron, which won the Sophie Brody Medal for Achievement in Jewish Literature from the American Library Association and the PEN/New England Award for fiction, and five story collections, including his new collection, The World To Come. Five of his short stories have been chosen for the Best American Short Stories, two for the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, and one for a Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Williams College.

Reviews

[Edward Champion · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sorry, but I was greatly underwhelmed by this "Jim Shepard classic." I was completely down to read a gripping novel about WW2 fighter pilots. And Shepard does have a pretty rousing flying scene near the end. He is also good with certain details, such as the grunt graffiti beneath a sign declaring the order of donning your uniform. But there's a curiously toothless quality to this book, despite Shepard's somewhat ostentatious swagger. I found myself recalling how James Jones wrote in an unapologetically candid manner about soldiers a good thirty years before Shepard published his first novel. Taken with the paper-thin characters, all we have left is Shepard's "muscular" prose, which wasn't entirely convincing to me. Because Shepard's more of a literary guy than a salt-of-the-earth dude. A small sample:

"The flak was everywhere around them, billowing in round puffs with strings of larger shrapnel trailing downward like legs. He was sweating, he realized, spinning the guns in an attempt to follow the action, his ears filled with bandits being called in and curses."

Now taken on its own merits, that's a perfectly respectable passage with a laudable prose style. But if the style here is being used to portray grunts who are willing to stretch themselves over the course of weeks to circumvent the minimum height requirement so that they can fly, well, it feels a little TOO self-aware.

This then is a case where the style doesn't quite fit the mood of war. Or at least it didn't for me.

[Mark Bellingham · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cards on the table, I like black comedy in most any form. This fits the bill - given the absurdly short life expectancy of any bomber crew in WWII, can they become competent before dying? Most did not and died. Most that did, died. Go figure. When life is absurd, living an absurd life is normal.

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nowhere near his best, but for the completist....

[Ginger Hallett · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sad, quickly becoming hopeless, story of American young men in England during WW2 who form the 10-man crew of a Fortress B17 bomber they named Paper Doll. The story is told mainly from the perspective of the flight engineer, Bobby Bryant, who is ill-prepared for war and knows it. Some of the other characters are fairly well-developed, in particular Gordon Snowberry, who is only 17 years old and who keeps a journal documenting his thoughts and experiences in writing and in drawings.

[Vivien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just heartbreaking.