Other people Takes & mistakes

Review by New York Times Review

ALMOST AT THE END of "Other People," David Shields's 369-page, 73-chapter collection of - what? Short essays? Aphorisms? Letters? Long emails to us? Fragments after the German Romantic style? - he remarks, in response to an early critic of his work: "Doesn't everybody have a pitiable heart? Aren't we all Bozos on this bus?" This plaintive, heartfelt, deeply endearing observation appears in "All Our Secrets Are the Same," a three-page essay about rereading hostile reviews of his first five books (he's got 20 to his name), which is really about the nature of "confessional" writing and, by way of Robert Dana, the poetry of Keats. An author can do nothing more embarrassing than admit he reads his own reviews, with the possible exception of defending himself against them, so, naturally, at the end of "Other People," Shields does both. He is fearless about making himself vulnerable to the reader; so fearless he is willing to say, over and over in this triumphantly humane book, that he is a coward. But at the same time - and this is the David Shields we've come to love and doubt - we never know when he is making it all up, when he's just pretending, when he's pulling our leg. He's our elusive, humorous ironist, something like a 21st-century Socrates, who happens to be particularly interested in sex, sports, selfhood, actors and fiction (all of which Plato's character Socrates also discusses, for that matter). Whether you love this book or find it incredibly annoying might depend on how you feel about irony. Many of the pieces in this collection seem unashamedly all about David Shields. An authentic-sounding letter to his father apologizes for a character who resembles him in the novel "Dead Languages." The hilarious one-page "Love Is Illusion" details the clichéd but unforgettable techniques of Shields's most memorable sexual partner, from a yearlong affair three decades ago. Even in "Blindness," his essay about Tiger Woods (the dozen essays about athletes could have been published as a classic sports book on their own), Shields manages to strike a dangerously confessional tone : "My initial reaction when I saw on the web the report that Tiger Woods was seriously injured was What's the matter with me that I hope he's been paralyzed or killed? Jealousy. The much vaunted Schadenfreude. The green-eyed fairway. Tiger is extremely rich, famous (now infamous), semi-handsome (losing his hair), semi-black, the best golfer ever (was going to be), married to a supermodel (no longer, of course). I wanted him to taste life's darkness.... I was disappointed that Tiger was O.K. (for the nonce). But, really, I think we all were." Shields goes on to develop a familiar thesis about human nature: that we are divided, vertiginous, self-deceiving beings who somehow, like good old Oedipus, can't help using our strengths to destroy ourselves. In about three pages the essay discusses Freud, Milan Kundera, Bill Clinton, the British television series "Cracker," Picasso, Renata Adler's books "Speedboat" and "Gone," and Shields's own evolving views of Greek tragedy. You worry that he is merely name-dropping, being hasty or superficial, but he's not. It's pithy, and it works. The shortest essays here tend to be the best, reminiscent of Roland Barthes's "Mythologies" and also the reviews and shorter essays of Jean-Paul Sartre. This is a very French book, really, and relies on the old-fashioned idea of an essay as an attempt. But there are fragments of interviews, too, and mysterious pieces of what seems to be fiction à la Diane Williams or Lydia Davis, and a long, bad poem by one Thomas Emmet Moore, which was saved, Shields suggests, by his father among copies of his mother's obituary (an obituary she wrote herself). For whatever reason, Shields seems particularly good at about three pages. In one essay at that length, "Surviving With Wolves," he mounts a passionate defense of the memoirist James Frey, who was (he says) "crucified for a handful of inaccuracies in no way essential to the character and spirit of the book." Shields doesn't like Frey's writing: His point is the narcissism and hypocrisy of our harsh response to the fictionalizing. "Our hatred of Frey," he writes, "was due to the fact that he didn't hurt himself badly or violently enough to justify himself as self-perpetrator." Shields is a master stylist - and has been for a long time, on the evidence of these pieces from throughout his career. You have to really search for a single offnote. The collection can stand as a textbook for contemporary creative nonfiction: erudite, soulful and self-deprecating like John Jeremiah Sullivan; freewheeling and insatiably curious like Geoff Dyer; hilarious and precise like Elif Batuman; and always fresh, clean, vigorous and clear. Even the pieces that fail - a "Fife Story" told entirely through clichés and bumper sticker slogans is about as much fun as it sounds - are at least charming. I wasn't a fan of Shields's celebrated manifesto "Reality Hunger," which argued for looser boundaries among genres and greater collaboration among artists. So I was pleasantly surprised by this book's collective tone, which is strikingly gentle, amiable and above all unpretentious. It almost always reads like a conversation with a highly intelligent friend who, after two beers but before three, decides to chat away about genuinely interesting subjects he's really thought about. If you want to fight your way through an essay to understand what the author is saying, David Shields is not for you; he has more in common with Ira Glass than Robert Coover or Stanley Fish (though in an essay on "the Brown literary aesthetic," he quotes all three). I began by suggesting that Shields is an ironist or a humorist or both, but there's something more going on here. When Shields writes about Bill Murray, in one of my favorite essays in the collection, he notes that Murray "offers ways out, solutions of sorts, all of which amount to a delicate embrace of the real, a fragile lyricism of the unfolding moment. He thus flatters me that under all my protective layers of irony I, too, might have depth of feeling as well." In Mahayana Buddhism there is a practice called tonglen, in which the meditator breathes in the pain, suffering and misery of others, and breathes out all of his own goodness, positivity and accomplishment to give it away. "In the practice of exchange, you take on the pain and misery of others, and you give away your own pleasure and luxury," the great Tibetan Buddhist Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche writes, describing this technique. "Exchanging oneself for others means that you become the other and the other becomes you." This, I think, is what Shields achieves at his best. All good writers make us feel less alone. But Shields also makes us feel better. He takes in some of the bad of everyday life and our culture and the whole inescapable mess of being human and sends it back to us as good. And all the while he insists that he's doing so not as a favor to us but just because he's the kind of guy who likes to talk about himself. Because the point, as Rimbaud reminds us in a quote that Shields closes with, is that "I is another." CLANCY MARTIN is the author, most recently, of the novel "Bad Sex" and the nonfiction book "Love and Lies."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]

---

Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* I'm not interested in myself per se, Shields wrote in his provocative work, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010). I'm interested in myself as theme carrier, as host. This approach has never been more evident than in his latest book. In dozens of brief essays, most lifted from his previously published books, Shields recasts his work into a hybrid narrative that is at once an essay collection, a memoir, and a critical dissection of pop culture and human relationships. As the title suggests, Shields examines others, namely friends and family and writers, athletes, and celebrities he admires. He portrays his father stalking an actor named Rudolph Schildkraut, convinced they are related. During a sleepover, teenage Shields lies to his know-it-all friend so he'll stop trying to catch his parents having sex. He dissects his love of sports movies and recalls run-ins with O. J. Simpson and Kurt Cobain. But in true Shieldsian form, his musings and observations ultimately bring him back to the subject he knows best himself, confessing behavioral similarities he shares with George W. Bush and evaluating his literary obsessions through the words of his harshest critics. Wise, surprising, and relentless, Shields demonstrates that life can be art, and so can repurposed ideas.--Fullmer, Jonathan Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

---

Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

This kitchen-sink compendium of Shield's work runs the gamut of subject matter and quality. The high points include sharply observed pieces that aren't quite conventional profiles, such as an appreciation of the actor Bill Murray and a portrait of the University of Washington women's basketball teammates who revived a star player after she went into cardiac arrest. There are plenty of low points, too, including short pieces of sexual memoir and musings on desire that read as solipsistic. His portrait of radio personality Delilah and her predominantly female audience is economical, evocative, and revealing. In this selection, Shields deftly shows rather than tells, forging a sense of connection to his subject. Many of the best pieces are about sports, including a meditation on Shields's love for sports movies and an exploration of baseball players whose patterns of thinking impaired their game. Failure typically plays a role in the best pieces, sometimes ruining personal interactions, sometimes inhibiting performance. Though there is a bit too much self-exploration, the persistent bite-size introspections help the reader better appreciate how well Shields can look at others. Agent: P.J. Mark, Janklow & Nesbit. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

---

Review by Library Journal Review

In his most recent nonfiction work, Shields (The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead) offers portraits of "other people," including family members, lovers, athletes, and celebrities. However, in these essays, Shields also frequently interrogates his notion of self, focusing a lens on his identity in relation to others. The author recognizes this inward gaze and feels the anxiety and ironic distance separating him from his subjects. This may be why he is at his best when he creates more fully realized portraits, such as those of television writer David Milch, basketball player Charles Barkley, and journalist Howard Cosell. This writerly tension, between being enmeshed in the world and at a critical remove from it, persists throughout, articulated most clearly when writing about Bill Murray: "are these just parts of myself in eternal debate, or am I really this anemic? Murray, for all his anomie, likes being in the world. Bully for him. I love standing in shadow, gazing intently at ethereal glare." VERDICT Readers fascinated by "a life limited but also defined by language" will enjoy this work by an established figure in the field.-Doug Diesenhaus, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

---

Review by Kirkus Book Review

An assortment of musings, cultural critiques, and memoir.In this zesty collection of 74 piecessome merely paragraphsrevised from work of the last 35 years, essayist, fiction writer, and biographer (of J.D. Salinger) Shields (Writer-in-Residence/Univ. of Washington; How Literature Saved My Life, 2013, etc.) reflects on family, love, contemporary culture, and his sometimes-problematic connection to other people. "I'm drawn to affectless people whose emptiness is a frozen pond on which I excitedly skate," he admits. And: "I have trouble reading books by people whose sensibility is wildly divergent from my own." In five sections, Shields considers Men (mostly his father); Women (many about a college sweetheart); Athletes; Performers (Oprah, Adam Sandler, Bill Murray); and Alter Egos, a motley category that contains essays on Brown, which he attended in the 1970s; infamous memoirist James Frey; and Shields' career as a school-age athlete. "From kindergarten to tenth grade all I really did was play sports, think about sports, dream about sports," he writes. "The body in motion is, for me, the site of the most meaning." Beset with a severe stutter, he hoped that excelling as an athlete would make others forgive him for his "disfluency." He shared a love of sports with his father, who suffered fom bipolar disorder and occasionally disappeared from the family for treatment. In several essays, Shields examines his Jewishness: "self-consciousness, cleverness, involution, ambivalence, pride, shame." And he shows a particular sense of humor: he quotes comedian Milton Berle "turning down a second drink at a Catholic charity event: Jews don't drink; it interferes with our suffering.' " Shields credits lifelong back pain with giving him "an invaluable education in the physical, the mortal, the ineradicable wound." He sums up what he learned: "Pain is inevitable," one doctor told him. "Suffering is optional." Many essays end in such aphorisms, and "Life Story" consists entirely of declarations that read like bumper stickers. Uneven but mostly sharp and appealing. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

---

I. Men Listening to men attempt to talk to each other is like trying to get The Magic Flute on Armed Forces Radio. --­(second lieutenant) caroline becker The origin of enslavement is the invention of writing. --­foucault COMP LIT 101: ADVICE FROM MY DAD Good to get your long and candid letter, Dave. I must say I'm somewhat perplexed by your reaction to your creative writing class. I think you have the accent on the wrong syllable, figuratively speaking. You're in this class to learn from the teacher, and perhaps from your fellow students. I think if you keep this in mind you'll loosen up a bit and get a great deal out of the course. All of your classmates are in the same boat; they're all just as apprehensive about revealing themselves as you are, even though some may be able to camouflage it better than others. I think it's great you were accepted in the class, and you should think so, too. Relax, and learn from this "famous" writer (though I don't know his books and had never heard of him before). A certain amount of fear and anxiety at the approach of a new experience is natural and healthy. I don't know any placid types who are creative people; intensity is what drives them to the outrageous thoughts and ideas ordinary people never think of. But anxiety also has to be ­self-­controlled if it's not to become the dominant force. .   .   . I find Kosinski a good writer, very good. Nobody I've read recently writes a better, simpler declarative ­sentence--­no extraneous language, not one extra word or sentiment. With your stuff I'm sometimes so busy untangling the syntax I don't know what you want to say. Not to be involved with mankind is not to have lived; join up. The Roth book you gave me for my birthday (thank you) grew on me. At first I did a foolish thing: I placed my own prejudices ahead of the novel. I wanted him to leave, for good, his absorption with his father and mother and their ­self-­deprecation. I wanted him also to leave the novel told in the first person. Why ­doesn't he write novels like everyone else? Writing them in the first person is the lazy way, the easier way. I soon realized how utterly naïve and unsophisticated such an attitude was and settled down to enjoy the book, even that very contrived exchange of letters between David and Debbie, and David and Arthur. I'm hoping that you won't wait as long as I did to learn how to make dinner, clean house, make sensible purchases, etc., etc. Just because one is a "poet" ­doesn't mean one has to be a schlemiel. I feel very strongly about this and look forward to talking about it in depth sometime. The Front? I ­didn't like it. The blacklistings were serious. I want serious subjects treated seriously. I went with your ­great-­uncle Hyman to hear Elie Wiesel give a talk at UCLA this week. A very moving experience, comparable only to the talk I heard by Chaim Potok several years ago. Wiesel had been in Ausch­witz as a teenager and so, of course, he spoke about the Holocaust and the baffling faith of the Jewish people in humanity. He opened with a tale of two Russian peasants who were sitting around drinking and talking. Jacob says to his friend Yosal, "Are you my friend?" "Of course," Yosal assures him. They talk some more and again Jacob asks Yosal if he's his friend and again Yosal assures him. Then Jacob asks him once more, "Are you ­really my friend?" And Yosal says, "Of course I am. Why do you keep asking?" "Well," replies Jacob, "if you are my friend, how come you don't know that I am hurting?" Wiesel closed his talk by quoting from documents that he'd seen recently, diaries and journals written by concentration camp victims who were forced to conduct their fellow Jews into the gas ovens and then later were themselves incinerated. They left letters and notes and descriptions in bottles and boxes in crevices in the ­crematoria--­some discovered only now. If ever there were people who had the right to tell all the world to go to hell, these were such people, but they wanted humanity to know what had happened there, and by sharing their experiences and describing them, they demonstrated their faith in the survival of the Jews and their faith that people would remember and not ever let such horrors happen again. It was a respectful, quiet, and appreciative audience, and there ­wasn't a dry eye in the house. Hyman went through two handkerchiefs himself. Don't stop the world because you want to get off. A ­play--­even a ­one-­act set in ­seventeenth-­century ­En­gland--­needs some "wasted" moments to make it work. Your protagonist, Lilburne, is alone way too much. Plus, he's a pompous martyr; he ­couldn't have been that ­self-­righteous in real life. I want to see him in private, enjoying himself with his family, being witty. So far he's so serious as to be inhuman. Work it out in emotional terms, not intellectual ones. It's been a long time since I've seen you. You've done a lot of greening and growing in the fourteen months since you were last here. I think I've done some, too. My old habits have been carted off to the dump. You'll see, I think, when you visit in March, although I thought I detected at the end of our last conversation a very conscious pulling away on your part. .   .   . John William Corrington writes in the darkly humorous tradition of a Barth, Donleavy, or Heller. He is concerned with the troubled spirit of this country and writes about it with gusto. Peace in the world or the world in pieces. I found that ­toward the end of summer I needed some distance between you and me because I was becoming so conscious of your writing, presumably about me. When you told me that after dinner with Hyman and me, you went downstairs and recorded our sodden trip down memory lane, I was disturbed by it, and after that I felt you were making mental or actual notes any time anything of an "interesting" or curious nature was discussed between Hy and me. I don't mind that you use any of your observations about me in your writing, but I do mind being made so conscious of the fact that you're doing it. If other people get this feeling, you may find that they, too, require distance from you, and this ­doesn't make for close, open, honest relationships. I've known quite a few writers and have never had the feeling with them that they were interested in me or observing me just for what grist I could provide for their mill. This is an attitude and approach that I think you will, in time, learn to cultivate. Some think O'Hara's stories consisted of an introduction, a little character development, and the rest was dialogue of a most ordinary nature. O'Hara was more than that, much more. He said the lonely mind of the artist is the only creative organ in the world. His advice: inherit money, have a job that will keep you busy, be born without a taste for liquor, marry a woman who will cooperate in your sexual peculiarities, join a church, don't live too long. Oh, he had his wild and uncontrollable moments. He thought of his work as a personal reassessment against the history of his time. An important writer of the '20s, '30s, and the '40s and clear until the time he died. .   .   . I know from your letters and even the things you say to me during our ­too-­brief telephone conversations that a considerable annealing has taken place, and I know it'll be very much in evidence in what you write. This blacklisted writer (played by Luther Adler, I think, maybe not), after coming out of jail for contempt of a congressional committee, gets some work in the gray market and then has a chance to do a script on his own. He can't believe his luck has changed. Then, when he goes over to his friend's place to celebrate, his friend says, "Well, it seems that somebody has been doing some poking around, and you know how it is, this ain't the end of the world, times will change, you'll see, one of these days we'll look back on all this and laugh, but in the meantime you're off the picture and we have to put some schnook, a nebbish who can't carry your typewriter ribbon, on the picture." Adler looks at him, looks through him, and on Adler's face is written all of man's grief from the beginning of time. His friend sees him to the door, arm languidly on his ­shoulder--­feeble gesture of phony friendship, but it's there. And he asks Adler, "What will you do now?" Adler says three words, and no more eloquent words have ever been spoken on screen, stage, TV, or anywhere: "Survive. I'll survive." He closes the door and walks off into the night. The scene haunts me still and I bet I saw it on Playhouse 90 ­twenty-­five years ago, maybe longer. ­That's real writing. Why not take the reader into your confidence rather than play a game of wits with him? Illumine the human ­condition--­that's all. Set it down one little word after another. No tricks or gimmicks. Did you know I must have tried half a dozen times to get down on paper those stories Hyman told you and me about being a panhandler in New York during the Depression? I never could get away from the plain reportage of it, even though I strove to put in "local color" and the "bums" as Hy depicted them. On my ­now-­and-­then tries, I ­couldn't get past the obligatory opening ­scenes--­descriptions of the Lower East Side, etc. Rarely got much further. "Fiction is not fact," wrote Thomas Wolfe (the real Thomas Wolfe). "Fiction is fact, selected and charged with a purpose." Which is exactly what you ­did--­blending Hy's memories with your imagination to put together an absorbing story. I can't begin to tell you how much it moved me, especially the very end, when Tannenbaum says Kaddish. Beyond my poor powers of description. (One minor criticism: Why do you need such a cutesy title? How many people nowadays even know what a dybbuk is? Why not just something simple like "A Boy Grows Up"?) BLOODLINE TO STAR POWER My father's birth certificate reads "Milton Shildcrout." His military record says "Milton P. Schildcrout." When he changed his name in 1946 to Shields, the petition listed both "Shildkrout" and "Shildkraut." His brother Abe used "Shildkrout"; his sister Fay's maiden name was "Schildkraut." Who cares? I do. I want to know whether I'm related to Joseph Schildkraut, who played Otto Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank and won an Academy Award in 1938 for his portrayal of Alfred Dreyfus in The Life of Emile Zola. I grew up under the impression that it was simply ­true--­the actor was my father's ­cousin--­but later my father was more equivocal: "There is the possibility that we're related," he'd say, "but I ­wouldn't know how to establish it." Or: "Do I have definite proof that he was a cousin of ours? No." Or: "My brother Jack bore a strong resemblance to him; he ­really did." From a letter: "Are we ­really related, the two families? Can't say for certain. ­What's the mythology I've fashioned over the years and ­what's solid, indisputable fact? I don't know. . . . ​We could be related to the Rudolph/Joseph Schildkraut family; I honestly believe that." In 1923, when my father was thirteen, his father, Samuel, took him to a Yiddish theater on the Lower East Side to see Rudolph Schildkraut substitute for the legendary Jacob Adler in the lead role of a play called Der Vilder Mensch (The Wild Man). Rudolph was such a wild man: Throughout the play, he hurtled himself, gripping a rope, from one side of the theater to the other. After the play, which was a benefit performance for my grandfather's ­union--­the International Ladies' Garment ­Workers--­my grandfather convinced the guard that he was related to Rudolph Schildkraut, and he and my father went backstage. In a tiny dressing room, Rudolph removed his makeup and stage costume, and he and Samuel talked. According to my father, Rudolph said he was born in Romania; later in his acting career, he went to Vienna and Berlin. He and his wife and son, Joseph, came to New York around 1910, went back to Berlin a few years later, and then returned to the United States permanently in 1920. (Joseph Schildkraut's 1959 memoir, My Father and I, confirms that these dates are correct, which proves only that my father probably consulted the book before telling me the story.) Samuel asked Rudolph whether he knew anything about his family's ­antecedents--­how and when they came to Austria. Rudolph said he knew little or nothing. His life as an actor took him to many places, and his life and interest were the theater and its people. The two men spoke in Yiddish for about ten minutes; my father and grandfather left. What little my father ­couldn't understand, my grandfather explained to him later. "For weeks," my father told me, "I regaled my friends and anybody who would listen that my father and I had visited the great star of the Austrian, German, and Yiddish theater in ­America--­Rudolph Schild­kraut. ­What's more, I said, he was probably our cousin. Nothing in the conversation between my father and Rudolph Schildkraut would lead me or anybody else to come to that conclusion for a certainty, but I wanted to impress friends and neighbors and quickly added Rudolph and Joseph Schildkraut to our family. I said, 'They're probably second cousins.' Some days I made them 'first cousins.' Rudolph Schildkraut, as you know, went on to Hollywood and had a brief but successful motion picture career. I told everybody he was a much better actor than his countryman Emil Jennings." In 1955, my parents were living in Los Angeles, my mother was working for the ACLU, and my mother asked my father to ask Joseph Schildkraut to participate in an ­ACLU-­sponsored memorial to Albert Einstein, who had died earlier that year. "After all," my father wrote in reply to one of my innumerable requests for more information, "Einstein was a German Jew and Pepi [Schildkraut's nickname] had spent much of his professional life in Berlin and was a member of a group of prominent people who had fled Germany in the years after Hitler and lived in the Pacific Palisades-Santa Monica area"--Arnold Schoenberg, Fritz Lang, Peter Lorre, Max Reinhardt, et al. Excerpted from Other People: Takes and Mistakes by David Shields All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

---