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Excited, but not to a Grave-Dancing degree
flikr (Bdiz)
In ’08 when I got a galley of Reality Hunger, it was pretty clear that the book was going to rouse a little rabble when it came out. After I read it for a grad school class, I invited David to speak on a panel discussion I was putting together and I got to speak to him a little about the book and later did an interview. David also asked me to ferry a copy of the book out to the iceberg where Zadie Smith lives to hand a copy of the book to Zadie Smith, who was teaching at my university that year. I managed to get it the book into her hands, albeit blushing heavily. (I do admire her, despite suspecting her blood might run metallic and cold.) My bet was that she was going to enjoy the manifesto, though not necessarily agree with its every platitude.
When Zadie’s strange review in The Guardian came out, I was surprised to have been mentioned in it as the “excited American writing student,” and the implication that my peers and I are dancing on the grave of the novel. (I would link to the article but it’s not up on their site anymore. Here’s something I wrote about it a while ago.) In fact, Professor Smith, I am not dancing on the grave of anything, especially not the novel.
So after reading Zadie’s essay, Lincoln Michel’s really smart review on The Rumpus and Sam Anderson’s funny but annoyed review in New York Magazine, I feel like I need to say something in Reality Hunger’s defense.
Yes, I enjoyed Reality Hunger, but it pissed me off a good deal and I found myself arguing with it. I like to think that I won some of the arguments, but I lost others. My previously held opinions were either strengthened by having to mentally defend them or changed by finding myself defenseless. In the end the work actually made me more excited about the future of the novel than ever before. To me, the book is very encouraging of the myriad possibilities of the novel. True, Shields is not so into straightforward narratives, and true, most of us still (more or less) are. But don’t let that one idea stop you from reading this book. It might make you come up with a more solid manifesto of your own.
Or, if you prefer, go ahead and fill a casket with all your dog-eared paperbacks and do the tootsie roll on the lid.
Tags: Lincoln Michel, reality hunger, sam anderson, Zadie Smith
catherine, no need to apologize. i read the book and didn’t think it very clever or particularly insightful. lincoln and sam, i’m sure, both already pointed out myriad issues why. i would only add that what shields is describing, approx. a rough pastiche of appropriated ideas, images, language is essentially a blog, not the lyric essay. also, for someone who’s a big fan of the people he lifted heavily from, as i read the words being reconstituted through shields i never felt like they were part of a cohesive voice that was working through a single authority. as soon as i read this or that aphorism, i was immediately pulled out of the text by thinking, oh, that’s d’agata, that’s barry hannah, that’s joyce. the person who best did what shields is trying to do was barthelme, a fiction writer. if you read tracy daugherty’s bio you can find out to what extent barthelme was truly mashing and juxtaposing ideas, ready-made phrases from pop culture, the art world, literature, etc. but he
put his own barthelmean twist on things. shields was lifting wholesale and doing some easy fragmented thing to show how the lyric essay was the “form of now.” lastly, take dfw. infinite jest was more him than any of his essays. he even went on record with david lipsky as saying his non-fiction persona was a schmuckier, stupider version of himself.
catherine, no need to apologize. i read the book and didn’t think it very clever or particularly insightful. lincoln and sam, i’m sure, both already pointed out myriad issues why. i would only add that what shields is describing, approx. a rough pastiche of appropriated ideas, images, language is essentially a blog, not the lyric essay. also, for someone who’s a big fan of the people he lifted heavily from, as i read the words being reconstituted through shields i never felt like they were part of a cohesive voice that was working through a single authority. as soon as i read this or that aphorism, i was immediately pulled out of the text by thinking, oh, that’s d’agata, that’s barry hannah, that’s joyce. the person who best did what shields is trying to do was barthelme, a fiction writer. if you read tracy daugherty’s bio you can find out to what extent barthelme was truly mashing and juxtaposing ideas, ready-made phrases from pop culture, the art world, literature, etc. but he
put his own barthelmean twist on things. shields was lifting wholesale and doing some easy fragmented thing to show how the lyric essay was the “form of now.” lastly, take dfw. infinite jest was more him than any of his essays. he even went on record with david lipsky as saying his non-fiction persona was a schmuckier, stupider version of himself.
Interesting.
I still want to read Shield’s book.
But I also want to re-read David Markson, especially his later novels, in which narrative is completely absent and the form is essentially tweet-like — in fact, these Markson novels function much more effectively as ‘twitter novels’ than any of the several I have looked at thus far.
The Markson novels suggest a story about Author. “Narrative” isn’t absent if you recognize patterns among the tweets and associate them till unwritten stuff about Author (sad, bitter, lonely, most likely dying) emerge and develop. Shields tried to do a similar thing with his quotes — an artistic autobiography told “slant” — but it didn’t work as well for me as Markson’s stuff.
The Markson novels suggest a story about Author. “Narrative” isn’t absent if you recognize patterns among the tweets and associate them till unwritten stuff about Author (sad, bitter, lonely, most likely dying) emerge and develop. Shields tried to do a similar thing with his quotes — an artistic autobiography told “slant” — but it didn’t work as well for me as Markson’s stuff.
Agree with LK about Markson’s “Last Novel.” All of the culled quotes definitely do develop a narrative through thematic repetition. Such a wonderful book. I’m very curious about Reality Hunger. No review that I’ve seen agrees with it, but they all say there are some interesting points.
Agree with LK about Markson’s “Last Novel.” All of the culled quotes definitely do develop a narrative through thematic repetition. Such a wonderful book. I’m very curious about Reality Hunger. No review that I’ve seen agrees with it, but they all say there are some interesting points.
i’m not sure the write-up i did would count as a review, but i don’t think that there are any interesting points that aren’t dealt with better elsewhere. it reminded me of a freshmen-level coursereader (the kind you get at the campus copy center) made for a class for whom the professor has very low expectations.
i’m not sure the write-up i did would count as a review, but i don’t think that there are any interesting points that aren’t dealt with better elsewhere. it reminded me of a freshmen-level coursereader (the kind you get at the campus copy center) made for a class for whom the professor has very low expectations.