Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

Originally a novelist, David Shields gave up fiction for hard-to-categorize nonfiction books like Black Planet (about race and basketball) and memoirish works such as The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead. So it’s no surprise that in his latest book, Reality Hunger, the author advocates for hybrid forms of writing, books that explode the boundaries between truth and fiction, memoir and journalism. “All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one,” he says, per Walter Benjamin.

Reality Hunger is a collection of snippets and quotations, arranged by the author into a new shape, and ornamented with his own thoughts and observations. “I had the sudden intuition,” he writes, explaining his creative process, “that I could take various fragments of things—aborted stories, outtakes from novels, journal entries, lit crit—and build a story out of them.” This could have been a mess, but the resulting “collage,” which brings to mind an amped-up Nicholson Baker, is entertaining, insightful and impressively broad (Shields bounces from James Frey and J.T. Leroy to Denis Leary and Chris Rock; quotes critics on hip-hop stars 50 Cent and the Game; and reproduces bits of Coetzee, Geoff Dyer, Ben Marcus and Woody Allen). Most important, it’s a guidebook for where literary writing could go in the future.

As for where we are now, Shields thinks that fiction has hit a dead end. “I’m bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters,” he writes. “I can’t read novels anymore, with very few exceptions, the exceptions being those novels so meditative they’re barely disguised essays.” You might not agree with Shields’s broadside or his hardheaded conclusions, but it’s difficult not to fall under the sway of this voracious and elegantly structured book. Reality Hunger is ultimately an invigorating shakedown of the literary status quo: recommended for readers, essential for writers.—Scott Indrisek

Shields reads Mar 11 at the Brooklyn Public Library and Mar 12 at the New School.

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