Spotlight: Local Writer on our Reality Obsession

Category: Seattlepi.com featured stories

 

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 to