Spotlight: Local Writer on our "Reality" Obsession

Seattle writer David Shields’ new book explores the cultural obsession with “reality”—and in doing so may well alter the future form of the novel

Pity the poor librarian or bookseller who must figure out how to classify David Shields’ latest book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (released this month; Knopf, $23.95). Part polemic, part cultural history, part memoir, part literary criticism and always provocative, the book comprises 618 numbered entries (many no longer than a Twitter tweet) pilfered and plundered from hundreds of sources—from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Michael Moore (most of whom receive due credit in the index). Shields himself wrote about half the entries, and the compendium adds up to a brilliant cacophony of his ideas about life, literature and the future of the novel form. A University of Washington English professor and author of nine previous books, including The New York Times best-seller The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (2008), Shields began the book by musing about the future of the traditional novel in the face of our culture’s obsession with “reality,” and our confusion of the real and the fictive. He pulls out all the stops in this sparkling, collage-like exploration of contemporary culture’s melding of reality and unreality—from reality TV and the quest for fame to karaoke and music sampling. While society may be confusing truth and fiction, Shields knows exactly what he thinks about the future of literature.

Seattle magazine: Pretend that we’re in an elevator and you only have a minute or two to describe your new book.
David Shields: The book started as a way for me to explain why I’m no longer a novelist. That may sound trivial, because who cares if I’m a novelist or not? But in the book I try to use my own dissatisfaction to explore something deep in the culture, where we’re all so pummeled by “reality” and so swarmed 24/7 by the pseudo real that we’re suffering from a disease that I call “reality hunger.”
SM: How does reality hunger affect the ordinary civilian, who maybe does not spend his or her time worrying about the blurring of fiction and nonfiction?
DS: It interests me that the interposition of reality and fiction dominates so much of our lives—whether it’s a fascination with Balloon Boy or with Tiger Woods’ personal life or the White House party crashers, this search for the “real” is in every part of our lives. The book is primarily about the artistic configuration of the real and unreal, but I think that all aspects of our lives, from our marriages to our politics to our religions, are a fascinating mixture of the real and the unreal.
SM: Are you worried about being seen as a killjoy for questioning the relevance of the novel form?
DS: I think it’s true. I’ve given a lot of lectures about the book around the country, and people always ask me, “What are you trying to do, kill off the novel? The novel is still fun.” I’m not trying to kill off the novel, I’m trying to renew it.
SM: Explain the book’s collage-like organization.
DS: Over the years I’d collected hundreds of passages and quotes into a course pack for my UW graduate students; then I realized that it could be a book. I broke the 618 entries into 26 rubrics going from A to Z, with chapters like “Memory,” “Reality TV,” “Hip-Hop.” It moves not chronologically but in an argument of logic through the reality hunger conundrum, giving an overview of the history of literature and touching on events such as the James Frey incident’s blurring of fiction and nonfiction. At the end it gets quite personal.
SM: How have sites such as YouTube, Facebook, etc. changed the way we think about the idea of story? If everyone has a story to tell, what does that say about the future of the novel?
DS: We have no idea how much our art forms are being changed by the new media. In fact, there was a British publisher who wanted to publish my book on Twitter as a series of 618 tweets. The unbelievable velocity and the channel-changing nature of our culture, the lack of privacy on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, make it preposterous to think that we would just go on writing 19th-century novels à la Flaubert, à la Jonathan Franzen. My book is an attempt to explore how we are being utterly changed by the new media.
SM: Does the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies [by Seth Grahame-Smith, Quirk Books, 2009] illustrate your point that hybrid forms can invigorate literary art?
DS: It’s a great title. It’s important to understand that all literature feeds on previous literature. It makes me happy to think that somebody loved Pride and Prejudice so much that he re-imagined it as a gothic tale. I hope that in 200 years someone will still be playing around with my books.
SM: There are seeds of Reality Hunger in the collage structure of two previous books of yours, Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography and The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead. What’s next for you?
DS: Reality Hunger is a crystallization of what I’ve tried to do with my other books. I don’t think I could push the collage form or compress my ideas much farther. Maybe that’s why I’ve started writing prose poems.

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Excerpt from Reality Hunger

The following excerpt, written by Shields, illustrates one of the precepts of the book: that often we do not know our own reality until it is reflected back to us.

I was nineteen years old and a virgin, and at first I read Rebecca’s journal because I needed to know what to do next and what she liked to hear. Every little gesture, every minor movement I made she passionately described and wholeheartedly admired. When we were kissing or swimming or walking down the street, I could hardly wait to rush back to her room to find out what phrase or what twist of my body had been lauded in her journal. I loved her impatient handwriting, her purple ink, the melodrama of the whole thing. It was such a surprising and addictive respite, seeing every aspect of my being celebrated by someone else rather than excoriated by myself…the language of the events was at least as erotic to me as the events themselves, and when I was no longer reading her words, I was no longer very adamantly in love with Rebecca.