Book of the week: Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields

(Knopf, 240 pages, $24.95)

“It’s about time” that writers everywhere were given a wake-up call, said Susan Salter Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times. In his “raw and gorgeous” new manifesto, former novelist David Shields argues that literature must change or it will shrivel to irrelevance—and he’s speaking about a crisis bigger than just the shift away from print to computer screens. Shields claims that plot and character are played-out conventions, and proposes a new collage aesthetic that takes cues from hip-hop, reality TV, and memoir. Readers want glimpses of the real, he says, and writers should respond by incorporating “larger and larger chunks of ‘reality’” into their pages.

Shields is picking more than that one fight, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. To dramatize his case against the importance of originality, for instance, he openly cribs hundreds of passages from other writers. His real argument isn’t with the culture at large, however, but with a tiny academic subculture of professors and professional writers, who apparently still hold novels in higher esteem than the fact-rich kinds of books that Shields prefers. By labeling his work a “manifesto” and shouting from the rooftops “that the novel is dead,” he is casting himself as the hero in a drama of his own creation. “It’s an old-fashioned tale”—and, like the clichés he condemns in other people’s books, “it’s pretty hokey.”

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Fiction fatigue is hardly anything new, said Zadie Smith in the London Guardian. The clanking gears of the novel have always been “nausea-inducing, especially if you happen to have written one yourself.” Many are the writers who would applaud the demise of the whole form—along with its “vulgar, sentimental, ‘bourgeois’—and hard-to-think-up—plots, characters, and dialogue.” What Shields recommends in its place is a primary form of literary expression—the lyric essay—that can be less constraining. But even the most perfect essay only explores the inner hallways of the self. For now, the novel remains the best tool anyone has devised for tackling that vast terrain known as “other people.”