3. David Shields

            “UC Berkeley lists the use of the phrase ‘America is the land of opportunity’ as a macroaggression.” –David Shields

When I first discovered David Shields, I spent an entire weekend reading him. I went to my local library and checked out two of his books—his 2010 manifesto Reality Hunger and his then-most recent book, How Literature Saved My Life—and holed up on my couch, knocking one off on a Saturday and the other the next day. On Sunday evening, I wrote up a response, cataloging my numerous objections to what I had just spent a weekend avoiding all social contact to take in.

My beef with Shields was not too different from that of the numerous pundits who had taken to the page to express their outrage: his dismissal of any form of literature that wasn’t collage-based-essay or meta-memoir (i.e. the “traditional” novel) seemed far too essentialist, his call for the permanent blurring of the fiction/non-fiction divide potentially dangerous. And yet, there was something in what Shields was getting at that I couldn’t shake, this idea that so much of well-regarded contemporary literature was a put-on jived with a creeping sense I was already feeling, and the license to completely dismiss whole reams of literary product felt hugely liberating. Before long, my objections were overcome, and I became a convert to the Shields way, embracing a collage approach in my own writing. It helped, too, that Shields frequently highlighted the work of writers he admired and who illustrated his preferred methodology more artfully than he could in his own work. In this way I discovered books like Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and the works of David Markson, titles that I should probably have been able to discover without Shields’ help but wasn’t and which proved foundational to my evolving sense of myself as a writer.

All that seems like another era now, both in the literary world and in the larger world as well. That exciting moment—which I myself came to late, after the general excitement had largely expired—when the lyric essay reigned supreme, that two year period (2009-2010) in which Shields, Nelson, John D’Agata, and Eula Biss all published work that seemed to finally advance the literary enterprise into what it needed to be for the 21st century, seems long gone. Of the above-mentioned quartet, none except for Shields has published a book of original work since at least 2015.

As for D.S., he remains as prolific as ever, but his particular brand of white male self-satisfaction feels increasingly like a relic from another time. This proves to be especially the case in his recent book Nobody Hates Trump More Than Trump: An Intervention. Employing (as skillfully as ever, it must be admitted) his trade-mark collage technique, Shields first attempts to psychoanalyze the president and then to implicate pretty much the whole of American society, with its fascistic tendencies major and minor, in his election, all in an attempt to solve his self-described “detective story,” to get to the bottom of Trump, as person, political figure, phenomenon.

Although occasionally interesting, particularly during the few moments of self-reflection (he quotes a “friend” comparing the “David Shields brand” to Trump’s), this is one of the writer’s least palatable projects, the product of both an almost unbearable bitterness and a more-or-less closed worldview. These qualities both come to the fore in a section entitled “28 Reasons Trump Will Be Re-Elected,” which offers up exactly what it promises. The list trades heavily in the received wisdom that coastal elites are completely out of touch and that’s why we have Trump, surely the least felicitous critical analysis to pop up in the wake of the 2016 election. Whether it’s colleges like U.C. Berkeley with their alleged coddling of the sensitive youth, the popular trend of no platforming offensive speakers, or a general disregard for the values of the heartland, Shields turns the blame on so-called P.C. culture, offering up a reading of the country’s politics that is more offensive than enlightening.

While I suppose I’ll always be grateful to Shields for shaping the course of my writing life, I can’t say I’m particularly looking forward to seeing what he does next (and he already has a new book out!) In just under a decade, he’s gone from a person who productively pissed off the right people to a man who few consider it worthwhile reckoning with. Part of that is the change in literary and world culture, but part of that is the hardening of certain qualities that inevitably come from decades of being an active writer. If these qualities, in Shields’ case, tend toward the distasteful, then, personally speaking, I do find it more than a little sad. As people in the world, we are forced to constantly rethink our preferences in the light of new information or new ways of thinking. It is a necessary but dispiriting process.