The absence of plot leaves the reader room to think about other things.
With relatively few exceptions, the novel sacrifices too much, for me, on the altar of plot.
Plots are for dead people.
The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps.
A seemingly scatterbrained collage of quotes and one-liners, Reality Hunger will do two things: cause hissy-fits at your local literary social and add swagger to postmodernists desperate to usher in new forms with a stab. How can I best summarize it? Author David Shields contends that nonfiction books, in particular memoirs, are no more factual than novels, and argues the memoir belongs on the same shelf as other works of fiction.
Conversely, the lyric essay, to quote Shields (who quoted Deborah Tall and John D’Agata of the Seneca Review), “gives primacy to artfulness over the conveying of information, forsaking narrative line, discursiveness, and the art of persuasion in favor of idiosyncratic meditation. [...]The stories it tells may be no more than metaphors. Or, storyless, it may spiral in on itself, circling the core of a single image or idea, without climax, without a paraphrasable theme.”
From this, Shields posits a literary form more suitable to today’s neo-tastes than, say, The Corrections or A Million Little Pieces; the latter showcased as an indictment of sorts, but toward the reader, a sort of finger-point to the consumer as to say, “Well of course he lied. And your point??” Shields doesn’t defend Frey per se, but does prop Frey and his flogged ilk to suggest that the masses are primed for the literary equivalent of reality TV: slanted, self-centered brevity.
An altruistic desire, in my opinion, because it gropes at a future when “I” is a forwardslash between writer and reader, without the murky business of plot and expository filler stuffed in novels, short stories and memoirs. The writer uses himself as the protagonist, the world’s a stage and the words bring forth that catalytic jumpstart inside the reader’s mind. Fair enough.
There is, however, the issue of the book’s construction.
“The progress of artistic growth in many media,” Shields wrote, “is being hindered, like those poor pine trees in alpine zones able to grow only a few weeks each year. For writers and artists who came of age amid mountains and mountains of cultural artifacts and debris: all of this is part of their lives, but much of it is off-limits for artistic expression because someone ‘owns’ it.”
Well yes, if use of these “cultural artifacts” are pilfered without attribution. The creation of a copyright-less Wild West is tantalizing, though perilous and it is difficult to understand Shields’ true motives for offering the idea in the first place. Never mind compensation for cited works. Shields’ world supposes its citizens would do the right thing, a pinky swear to give a head-nod to the originator(s) of the source material.
More importantly, quoting ad nauseam, as the case in Reality Hunger, conveniently tucks away the author’s opinion on the matter at hand. So easy, so tempting to say in the face of legitimate criticism, or a simple question, “Well, those aren’t my words. That’s not what I meant.” Where is the risk associated with using one’s own words? Where’s the moral stiffness in one’s back when the author-as-character, the slanted “I”, chooses to explain (or not) the use of this word or that phrase?
A parry of literary and critical ownership, a case of “Yeah, I said it” versus “Yeah, I may have meant that through proxy” castrates the idea, the author. Or more colloquial, a reader is left to question if the author truly has the balls to stand on his own, cast aside the rhymes he bit off contemporaries and classic masters alike, and answer for his unfettered stance.
Though the book remained entertaining, this is my primary beef with Reality Hunger and the new era it investigates. Pages 211 – 219 contain the appendix, the bibliography, the primer needed to decode and reveal Reality Hunger as a provocative theorem rendered as a well-researched, painstakingly cobbled book of quotes, similar to those slim, flimsy, cheerful books given for Christmas when Best Buy is out of gift cards. I wanted Shields, I got musings from Nabokov, Walk The Line and DJ Spooky. Reality Hunger and its author had no balls.
A stylistic choice to illustrate the idea, not the word, as all important, the quotes thrust Shields into the realm of “unreliable narrator,” one that is readily available to fiction writers and poets, but not to lyric essayists or, in general, creative nonfiction writers. It raises the question: Why? Creative nonfiction, in all its forms, leaves room for restraint, to withhold backstory in the name of immediacy, while simultaneously inviting the nonfiction writer, the essayist, into the story, a “come hither” for personal expression beyond literary acrobatics.
So why the need for avatars—akin to characters in a novel—to assert an opinion wholly believed, if not entirely understood? Reality Hunger is a “spiral in on itself,” a display of the author’s certainty in what he feels, but not what he knows, as his truth. Creative nonfiction, lyric essay, at its finest.
Shields’ ideas will set the stage for much needed discussion into literature and its relevance to a world dominated by streams of image and sound. There is urgency in Shields’ work, a sense that writers must abide by the times, must find new in-roads to readers, and should consider how to navigate this new, interconnected world without compromise of one’s artistic integrity.
The quotes, however, blunts the message, buffers the messenger. Expression doesn’t blossom, it only sprouts as crabgrass. A simple “I think that” or “In my opinion” would’ve allowed the manifesto to bellow, rather than whimper amid a cacophony of voices foreign to the author. It’s not enough to hint at an idea and let others do the talking. The “I” in Reality Hunger was slanted until I realized I was looking at it, and Shields, sideways.
Book published by Knopf, 2010.
