FICTION

H by Elizabeth Shepard (Viking: $17.95; 160 pp.) Told entirely through letters written between the nine different characters, Elizabeth Shepard’s first novel, “H,� concerns a 12-year-old boy who is almost completely unable to form relationships of any kind. Benjamin Sherman lives in a secret, complex, made-up world derived from the stuffed letter H he carries everywhere. The H, who is named Elliot, simultaneously represses and sustains Benjamin by being a sort of mother, friend, confidant and dictator to the exclusion of anyone else.

Shepard’s novel is divided into three sections, which work with varying degrees of success. Part I deals with Benjamin’s first summer in camp, and though the format is interesting--letters written by various people who come into contact with him--the characters aren’t particularly notable nor are the stakes high enough to compensate. In the science section we meet Benjamin himself though his highly detailed correspondence with Elliot. “H� really begins to gather momentum when Benjamin is hospitalized in the third section, since only then does it become clear that he is fighting for his life.

In spite of some compelling writing, particularly toward the end, “H,� has a strangely distant feel to it, almost as though a subtle but definite layer of gauze surrounds the entire book. It is difficult to know if this comes from the fact that these characters are only visible through their letters, or if the gauzy quality is a deeper problem in Shepard’s writing.