David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
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Review by Scott Nadelson
For several years now, since he first published an essay in The Believer that would form the seed of his new book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, I have been arguing in my head (and once or twice in person) with David Shields.
In that original essay, and far more expansively in the book—released this month—Shields makes an argument for a new literature that strives toward a “deliberate unartiness,” that embraces authenticity, that avoids contrivance at all costs. He champions collage over linear narrative, meditation over invention, lyric essay over the well-plotted novel. He challenges long-held notions about the primacy of fiction in the literary universe, calling instead for work that is self-reflective, confessional, messy. He encourages writers to borrow and recontextualize passages from others’ work the way hip-hop artists sample beats and riffs. He does so in a series of essays built on collage, aphorism, and appropriated quotation, few of which he attributes, except in a series of notes at the book’s end—these the publisher added against the author’s will, and he encourages readers to cut them out and throw them away.
In the private, imagined arguments we’ve been having, Shields is intelligent and articulate, saying things like, “Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason, and I want to say, No, it doesn’t,” and I answer with something less intelligent or articulate, something along the lines of, “But I like stories.” And it’s true. I do. I’m a sucker for the way a story can cast a spell, can draw me into the world of people I don’t know, can make me feel things other than the dull ache of boredom and anxiety I feel when I’m going through the motions of daily tasks, can allow me to experience things (or at least imagine the experience of things) I’ll never experience in the limited boundaries and duration of my “real” life.
And while I love much of the work Shields discusses in Reality Hunger—Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, for example, or Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, or Gregoire Bouillier’s The Mystery Guest, or Leonard Michaels’ Journal, or John Cheever’s journals—I also still long for stories with intricate plots and invented characters and beautiful language; I want to read “Goodbye, My Brother” at least as often as I dip into Cheever’s Journals. While reading Reality Hunger, I find myself nodding along with all the brilliant things Shields has to say, and yet…
And yet, this, I believe, is the point of Shields’ book.
What’s wonderful about Reality Hunger is that it asks you to argue with it, it demands dialogue and wrangling in a way that few books do. In the classic tradition of art manifestos, it is forceful, fiery, sometimes belligerent, but its main goal is to challenge readers to think deeply about preconceived notions, to defend their own artistic choices, their own aesthetic tastes. From now on, whenever I choose to read or write a linear narrative, I have to ask myself, what is the artifice hiding? What does it obscure? Is the work as honest as it can be, or does its construct keep me at a safe distance from the messiness of life and the ugly complexity of human nature?
Shields’ book is a guide for those of us hungry to connect with each other in a world that does all it can to keep us apart.
I finished it yesterday, and a few minutes after I put it down, I picked it back up and started reading it again. I have a feeling that my argument with Shields will continue for a long time to come.
Hawthorne Books author Scott Nadelson is author of The Cantor’s Daughter, winner of the Samuel Goldberg & Sons Fiction Prize for Emerging Jewish Writers and the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize, Saving Stanley: The Brickman Stories, winner of the Oregon Book Award for short fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, and the forthcoming Aftermath: Stories.
Visit Scott Nadelson’s website @ www.scottnadelson.com
One Response to “David Shields’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto”
Caleb Powell says:
March 26, 2010 at 3:20 pm
Well said, I agree with you, and found myself with the same thoughts…disagreeing with much of what Shields said, liking or being curious to explore what he liked, but not being satisfied with his attacks. I interviewed him a while back:
http://therumpus.net/2010/02/the-rumpus-interview-with-david-shields/
In person he’s full of doubt about life, but certain about his tastes.