How Literature Saved My Life, by David Shields - NYTimes.

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February 8, 2013

Spread the Word

By MARK OCONNELL

HOW LITERATURE SAVED MY LIFE

When you read David Shields, the first thing you learn is that he takes literature very seriously. The By David Shields second thing you learn is how seriously he takes his 207 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. taking seriously of literature. Theres a striking $25.95. moment in the closing pages of his new book, How Literature Saved My Life, when he tells us that he is interested only in literature that obliterates the boundary between life and art. Acutely aware of our mortal condition, he writes, I find books that simply allow us to escape existence a staggering waste of time (literature matters so much to me I can hardly stand it). If there were such a thing as a quintessentially Shieldsian pronouncement, this may be it, with its odd tonal mixture of the bombastic and the beseeching. Shields wants you to know that he is a writer for whom neither life nor art is a matter to be taken lightly. How Literature Saved My Life is precisely the type of book he set out to agitate for in Reality Hunger his provocative 2010 policy statement on genre-noncompliant writing at least in the narrow sense that its difficult to say precisely the type of book it is. Its an oblique and fractured memoir that approaches self-representation by way of diverse (and heavily quotation-based) considerations of the reading and writing life, but its also, in its way, just as much a manifesto as its predecessor. Its an argument for the type of book it is. Which is to say that we are deep in Shields country here a formally demilitarized zone over which no one mode of writing gets to claim jurisdiction for more than a paragraph or two. The text is composed of numerous mini-essays, fragments and chunks of quotation, none of which is longer than a few pages, and some of which are as short as a few lines. If there is anything like an organizing principle here, its expressed in the heading of the books prologue: All criticism is a form of autobiography. What immediately follows is a short essay about the extent to which Shields identifies with the 30-something poet and novelist Ben Lerner, whom he sees as my doppelgnger of the next generation. This notion of identification becomes, as the book progresses, a central existential and aesthetic imperative. Shields seems interested only in those
1z3 2013-02-12 10:47

How Literature Saved My Life, by David Shields - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/books/review/how-literature-sav...

things works of art, people, ideas in which he can see himself. This, of course, is as much a device for literary self-representation as it is an advanced form of narcissism. In theory, its an intriguing approach. But in practice, it winds up making Shields seem like someone with a radically attenuated and reductive sense of the world beyond the perimeters of his own ego a sort of high-functioning solipsist. At one point, he riffs about identifying with George W. Bush (both are lazy, poor administrators, tend to think of their own safety in a crisis, and so forth), finally coming to an oddly self-aggrandizing conclusion: Every quality I despise in George Bush is a quality I despise in myself. He is my worst self realized. Its as though Shields is uninterested in any version of Bush that he cant reduce to his own experience, and even less interested in any interpretation of Bushs political career that goes beyond his (compellingly Shields-like) personal failings and idiosyncrasies. Identification seems to be the primary criterion, too, in his writing about literature. Criticism can be turned to autobiographical account as demonstrated by Geoff Dyer in Zona and Out of Sheer Rage, Nicholson Baker in U and I and Elif Batuman in The Possessed. The typical extent of Shieldss engagement with a work of literature, though, is to give us the gist of the book, and then to briefly note how much it means to him personally. At one point, he provides a longish summary of William T. Vollmanns Butterfly Stories and discloses that reading this extraordinarily intimate book about the butterfly boys incapacity for ordinary intimacy, I couldnt identify more closely with him if I crawled inside his skin. Thats it; thats all we get. Shieldss version of self-representation through writing about literature turns out to be a limited exercise in enumeration and invocation. The longest section is a list of 55 works I swear by, where we get a bunch of brief descriptions of books Shields loves. It doesnt amount to criticism or memoir; it feels, actually, like clicking through an unusually highbrow Tumblr. (Perhaps this social-media effect is intentional: one of the models Shields offers for how books can coexist with contemporary culture and catalyze the same energies for literary purposes is the viral Twitter phenomenon _ My Dad Says.) To read How Literature Saved My Life is to experience a kind of cognitive dissonance, caused by Shieldss curious insistence on announcing what hes doing, or planning to do, while never actually attempting to do any such thing. My favorite books, he writes, are candid beyond candid, and they proceed from the assumption that well all be dead in a hundred years: here, now, in this book, Im going to cut to the essence. You find yourself practically pleading with him to do so. Its like an Oulipian stunt, whereby the author keeps insisting on the primacy of raw, unmediated self-revelation
2z3 2013-02-12 10:47

How Literature Saved My Life, by David Shields - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/books/review/how-literature-sav...

in literature while revealing nothing much about himself beyond the sort of self-revelatory books he likes, and nothing much about those books apart from the fact that he likes them. Similarly, his usual way of approaching important topics is to talk about how hes approaching them typically by way of a well-chosen quotation from another writer. He quotes Cormac McCarthy on our inability to talk about death, the major issue in the world, before claiming that Im trying to do a very un-American thing here: talk about it. He goes on to quote Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace on the topic, relieving him of the need to consider it in any kind of penetrating way himself. This is not a lapse; its the foundation of Shieldss collage method of writing. There is, finally, a paradox at the center of the book. In drawing on all these disparate elements and incorporating them into its narcissistic arrangement in shoring these fragments against his ruins Shields manages to thoroughly obscure himself. For all its talk about rawness and directness, How Literature Saved My Life comes across as a thwarted exercise in technique and artful self-display.
Mark OConnell is the author of the e-book Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever. He is a staff writer at The Millions, and teaches contemporary literature at Trinity College, Dublin.

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2013-02-12 10:47