=2013 Books Read=

Reality Hunger
David Shields

1.  By chance, I picked up this book about a year ago at the library, read the dust jacket hysteria, and was sufficiently annoyed to put it right back on the shelf where I found it: another self-important screed treating matters I'd thought about ten, fifteen years ago as "explosive" and "revelatory." No thanks.

Of course, I was jealous and embittered. Unlike Shields, I have no academic platform from which to pitch these "inflammatory" "revolutionary" ideas. I quit graduate school to take up living with someone out of some mistaken notion of "living in the real world"--a mistake, not necessarily because the "real world" doesn't exist, but because I never had any suitable place in it. 

I haven't the credentials and connections that academia would have granted me had I stayed on and finished my MFA at Syracuse, not to mention if I'd retreated from reality altogether and earned my Ph.D. 

Oh well, I took the road more traveled by and here I am. It's not David Shield's fault. It's not even my fault. I'm not the person I used to be. If I were, I'd talk some sense into her. Or box her ears. Or both.

Anyway...

2. Flash forward to a month ago: I read a blog-post (Levi Asher, LiteraryKicks) referencing the book in a review of Shields new book, How Literature Saved My Life, and thought, "Well, maybe I should go back and read Reality Hunger, after all...so long as I can get it free at the library, that is." There's no rush. I've still got another Anita Brookner novel to finish. 

Last Sunday morning, still in bed as the clock inched past nine, opportunity knocked. At the time, I was sitting back on my heels between my husband's spread legs. Hands laced behind his head, smiling contentedly against the headboard, he sighed and said, "How about we go to the library today after breakfast? Would you like that?" 

Never one to miss an opportunity to go to the very magnificent central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, I delicately licked the corners of my mouth, smiled prettily, and said "You bet!" 

Then I snuggled up in his burly arms for a great big hairy-chested snuggle until he roused himself and said, "So what do you think about rustling me up some breakfast, wench? Scrapple, I think, this morning."

One breakfast later...

3. As it happened, Reality Hunger was available, sitting on the bottom shelf, just waiting for me to borrow it. There were two copies, in fact. I was pleasantly surprised. So often I don't find what I'm looking for at the library, only to find something else even more interesting. On this particular day I signed out: A.S. Byatt's The Biographer's Tale, Dean Young's The Art of Recklessness, and The Three Button Trick and Other Stories by Nicola Barker. And, of course, the one book, aside from The Art of Recklessness, that I actually came to borrow: the aforementioned, but so far unreviewed, Reality Hunger.

4. It was true what I said at the start of this pseudo-review. That I'd actually come to many of the same conclusions that David Shields has about literature over a decade ago. Maybe even more than a decade ago. Certainly I'd had these ideas in nascent form ever since I was in graduate school and conscious of myself as a writer. The need for a "new"kind of cross-genre literature that features immediacy, ultra-flexbility, speed, leaps (derived in part from Robert Bly's evangelical celebration of "leaping poetry"), collage effects (derived in part from Burroughs and Gysin and the entire history of art in the 20th century)--all these elements seemed to me then, and even more do they seem to me now, essential strategies for replicating how the mind, at least my mind, and apparently David Shields' mind, actually perceives reality. How could the traditional novel in particular, and traditional literature in general, capture that? In fact, once the internet came into play, how could traditional publishing accommodate it either? 

Answer: it couldn't, it can't.

5. Here's the criticism of Reality Hunger and of people, like me, who like the book, who find it inspiring: in the end, it champions the short attention span. At least that's the charge to which it lays itself open.

Shields wants information and revelations and climax without the connective narrative tissue. He writes that he's always been inspired to write a book filled with epiphanies--he'd build a literary House of Epiphanies, in each room a surprise, a shock, a treasure. He'd get rid of the long boring hallways in between. So would I. He finds the traditional novel a tedious and unnecessary machinery for conveying us to where we really want to go. Why not just go to the destination? Or, at least, just describe the destination? I get what he wants because I want it, too. He doesn't want to wade through a 600-page novel to garner half-a-dozen insights. He wants a precis of a novel, a report detailing the highlights. He wants a short story instead. Better yet, a short-short. An aphorism.

But that doesn't mean that everyone else wants what he wants and I think that's where he antagonizes people. A lot of people don't mind taking the long way around. They don't mind being taken to "another world," something Shields baldly states he finds of almost no interest.

Shields doesn't see literature as "entertainment" but as an almost religious/spiritual endeavor. Many people see it as exactly that. They want to be entertained.

Maybe the most self-damning thing Shields asserts is that reality television actually provides a better format for embodying the truths about our lives than the stale inventions of narrative fiction. This seems to me the weakest link in his argument. Because, although I agree that we need an art that more effectively reflects real life, if art is synonymous with real life, as it supposedly is in the realm of reality television, what do I need art for at all? I have my own screwed up life to entertain me. I don't need to see someone else's screwed up life on television, or to read about it in books either, for that matter. 

The fact is that no matter how "real" a depiction might claim to be...it's still a fiction. And this is something that Shields pretty much admits throughout Reality Hunger. Even the "honest" memoirist, doing his or her best to recall their memories as faithfully as possible, must necessarily fictionalize.

So...where does that leave us????

It leaves us hungering for reality and with no way to provide ourselves with a 100% daily requirement for it. We can only approximate and I suppose, in the end, what Shields is really arguing for is more reality in our art, less filler, as little filler as possible.

Okay, maybe there is something even worse that Shields cops to in Reality Hunger, worse even than his slanted admiration for reality television. He believes reality is subjective, and radically so; most people do not. He doesn't shy away from the charge of solipsism. In fact, he all but embraces the notion. He seems to believe that the only difference between a solipsist and a non-solipsist is that the non-solipsists haven't admitted to their solipsism yet. (Perhaps they're too solipsistic to do so). Who can blame them? Being a solipsist is considered to be almost as bad as being a child molester.  

6. Finally, here's the praise: Reality Hunger is an inspiring, thought-and-argument-provoking book. And the arguments and thoughts it inspires are both of the kind worth having. Shields champions a form of writing that he calls the "lyric essay." What is that, exactly? It's hard to say. He defines it, sort of. What he really seems to be after is not so much a "form" of writing, but a way of writing, in which the author seeks the unique form most appropriate to the subject at hand. He harkens us back to the original meaning of the term "essay" which is to assay a subject, "to make an attempt." Shields thus seeks to avoid the very problem he finds with the novel (and other traditional genres), which is the boring predictability and the inherent limitation of a finished product dictated by pouring even fresh content into readymade forms. 

It's easier for him to give examples of what he likes than to define it. He cites, among others, work by authors such as Fernando Pessoa, Samuel Beckett, Ann Carson, and Ben Marcus as the sort of thing he'd like to read (and write) more of. 

The book itself is comprised of fragments, including many call-to-arm quotations and pithy paraphrases from authors as diverse as Nietzsche, Montaigne, Beckett, Didion, Nabokov, Dillard, Emerson--well, even a sampling isn't enough to give you a proper idea. Many citations are from authors less well-known and more contemporary, authors that Shield's considers to be writing on the front lines of the "new nonfiction."  

7. I don't mind saying that Reality Hunger is one of the most worthwhile books I've read on writing in quite some time, even if I did formulate most of these thoughts on my own ten, fifteen, even twenty years ago. The book reminded me that I was on the right track in one sense, even if I were on the wrong road altogether.