Nominated for this year’s National Book Award, Jim Shepard’s collection of fiction, “Like You’d Understand, Anyway” (Knopf, 224 pages, $23), ranges daringly across time, bounding from ancient history to the present — and back.

All of Mr. Shepard’s stories are told in the first person, and a reader not familiar with him might therefore expect the book to be a work of ventriloquism. But Mr. Shepard has mastered the voice of the normal guy, and his accomplishment here is to make a Roman soldier sound less than epic: he writes not with the giddy time transcendence of a typical author of historical fiction, but with the firmness of someone who is confident that quotidian reality hasn’t changed much since Aeschylus.

Furthermore, Mr. Shepard’s seemingly humble voice does serious literary work. It can make a passionate confession sound like something that would pass at any sports bar. Read this 19-word paragraph, a novel in three lines:

We honeymooned in San Francisco. Here’s what that was like for me: I still root for that city’s teams.

Mr. Shepard is not hard-bitten, Hemingwayesque, or in any way tough. Rather, he has found the authentic voice of characters who don’t care too much about how they sound. Most of these stories pick up the character just after he’s lost his nerve, just when he’s ready to begin his confession. Take the opening paragraph from “Ancestral Legacies”:

This is the roof of the world. An immense, sequestered place, the highest of the high plateaus, many times the size of the Reich. I’m still sick. The porters still gesticulate and exchange private jokes when they assume my attention is elsewhere. Beger’s bad ankle is still swollen. Somewhere I’ve misplaced my certainty.

Thus speaks a wayward Nazi scientist, assigned to study Indo-European origins in the Himalayas, but more interested, ironically, in the possibility of subhuman Yeti. This paragraph distills the Shepard story: strange setting, looming catastrophe, and crisis of confidence. The scientist may rack up adjectives like “immense, sequestered,” but then he comes out with the everyday admission: “I’m still sick.” \

Mr. Shepard takes pains to make colorful characters sound normal, and yet can also break into song, practically, when given the chance. In “My Aeschylus,” the famous tragedian, about to take part in the battle of Marathon, mentions his plays but mainly tells the reader about his two brothers and about his own black sheep complex. On the brink of battle, though, he has a vision:

In the cattle-stunning light before we step off, I can see it . . . [The Persians] will be cut down, body on body. They will endure being god-overturned in war. Their slaughter will extend all the way back to their ships at anchor . . .

The phrase “cattle-stunning light” sounds convincingly Homeric, although it is certainly more characteristic of Mr. Shepard than Homer to consider the cow’s point of view. Even his contemporary, everyday American settings achieve weirdness. In this respect Mr. Shepard resembles T.C. Boyle. But where Mr. Boyle might immerse himself in the world of Texas high school football, Mr. Shepard swings through it, grabbing what local flora he needs to tell the story of “Trample the Dead, Hurdle the Weak,” my favorite in this collection. It’s a morality tale, like most in this collection, about brothers or teammates, riven in this case by the pressures of father-to-son expectations. Even speaking through the ironic voice of a benighted defensive lineman, Mr. Shepard springs the full heartbreaking earnestness of high school football upon us.

Besides brotherhood, agonized over in story after story here, Mr. Shepard’s other great theme in this collection is empire. They are not unrelated: A disgruntled Roman sentry, manning Hadrian’s Wall and on the lookout for Caledonians, notes that “Rome has conquered the world by turning brother against brother.” The inhabitants of one conquered nation are mustered to fight the inhabitants of the next. A legionary’s loyalties slide from family to Rome. Aeschylus prefers his art to his own brothers, and in “Sans Farine,” an executioner passively chooses his guillotine over his own, horrified wife. Though the legionary hesitates, most of the protagonists in this collection need the escape offered by societal conflict, whether their families understand or not. In Mr. Shepard’s fiction, wars assume the form of sibling rivalry on a grand scale.

blytal@nysun.com