Reality Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields: review

By Philip Womack Published: 6:00AM GMT twenty-three February 2010

This book coupler is ornate with quotations from important writers: "Exhilarating", says J M Coetzee. "Thrilling", gushes Zadie Smith. You competence be forgiven for meditative that David Shields had constructed a higher sort of novel. You would be wrong. Puff quotes are customarily a pointer of a well-connected writer whose book has been review and dignified by his luminary friends. Here, Smith and Coetzee are dual of the writers praised by Shields in his "manifesto". This creates me a small uneasy.

Shieldss topic is that the novel the talented building a total of a story has atrophied. It has turn formidable for writers to live a universe that is increasingly artificial, and they should instead find inside of their own lives for truth, as Smith and Coetzee have done.

The Last Englishman Pick of the Paperbacks Penalty shoot-outs: how to take the undiluted spot-kick Childrens Books Literary hulk - or a nasty square of work?

This craving for being is demonstrated in the outrageous recognition of wretchedness memoirs. Shields does not reject James Frey (whose "memoir" A Million Little Pieces was unprotected by Oprah Winfrey as a fraud) for his lying; he points out that people felt bad usually since theyd review a novel by mistake. It is this sort of essay that Shields wants to encourage: a blurring of law and fiction, where the self is the starting point. Not so majority a craving for reality, then, as a craving for pieces of reality. But that doesnt receptive to advice utterly so snappy.

The book is laid out in twenty-six chapters, each separate in to numbered sections (617 in all), majority of that are approach quotations or paraphrases of alternative writers. The experience of celebration of the mass this collage is jarring. It cannot be used up similar to a required work. Each cube contingency be weighed and eaten separately. Some of the utterances are cryptic: "It is my aspiration to contend in 10 sentences what everybody else says in a total book what everybody else does not contend in a total book." He has a robe of creation such contradictions cover-up as knowledge I cant assistance meditative of Yoda or those lines about spoons from The Matrix.

Yet a little are thought-provoking: "Reality-based art is a embellishment for the actuality that this is all there is, there aint no more." Some are approach challenges: "The novel is dead. Long live the antinovel, built from scraps." He takes digs at Hamlet "a sleepy old plot" and, by extension, Shakespeare: "only the think artist starts from art; the loyal artist draws his element from elsewhere: from himself". But Virgil, for example, proposed from art he used Homer as a approach model. Was he not a unqualified artist?

Shields tells us that the texts are the lives, entrance to us in fragments, and that we can figure them at will. In any case, the memories are defective. Its an engaging point, but Im not convinced. Our craving for the fantastical is still as clever as ever.

Reality Hunger: a Manifesto

by David Shields

240pp, Hamish Hamilton, �17.99

Buy right away for t �15.99 (PLUS �1.25 p&p) 0844 871 1515 or from Books