Customer Reviews

Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

For those of us readers who feel absolutely barraged by the literary world's seemingly never-ending thunderstorm of memoirs, "how to write" books, and autobiographies, David Shields has an answer. His self-proclaimed "attack on autobiography" succeeds in its poignancy, its quirky (often scary) humor, and its not-too-subtle critique on its own genre. Shields gives us his take on subjects ranging from criticism to Bill Murray to his own semi-fictional comings of age. He masterfully links 22 seemingly unrelated chapters in a manner which, upon finishing the book, the reader feels that he or she has been taken on a roller-coaster-esque ride through not just the author's life and culture, but through our lives and culture as well.

I read this book in an afternoon, in a single sitting. It's a book that, while maintaining its goal of introspection into something universally human, is still very fun to read. I felt the pangs of the narrator's past mistakes, laughed along with Shields when he quotes Mr. Murray, and got justifiably frustrated when taken along for a ride on the other side of a book review. Shields takes us into himself in an honest, open way and, in doing this, somehow opens some of our own doors; by telling us his dirty secrets, he reminds us of our own and lets us remember that we're all as goofy, confused, and [messed] as the next guy

Just as the cover is a menagerie of snapshots of the author, the insides of Enough About You contains 22 refreshing snapshots of one man's life that is somehow both unique and universal at the same time. Highly, highly recommended.

Photographs of the author from babyhood to middle age are everywhere on the great-looking cover of this book. Shields was a cute baby, a good-looking kid, and is a handsome man - but that's no reason to hold it against him.

Despite the flippancy of the book's title, in fact this is collection of deeply personal essays and informal cultural and literary criticism. Shields is a Professor of English and it's obvious he loves to teach: he provides a quirky survey course, too. In the first 45 pages, he cites more than several writers, among them his parents, Walt Whitman, Thomas Wolfe, Steinbeck, Bellow, Hunter S. Thompson (who once called him a "pencil-necked geek" for doubting some Thompson reportage), Sartre, Shakespeare, Proust, Updike, Nabokov - among others. In addition you quickly catch on that he loves film, and sports, and games, too. He loves to laugh - and is interested in the comics who provoke that laughter.

Shields doesn't embarrass easily, but he doesn't want to embarrass others, either. The piece "Properties of Language" is an appreciation, and it reminded me to reread some of my favorite writers. He loves Bill Murray and explains why in "The Only Solution to the Soul is the Senses." Shields recalls and deconstructs his obnoxious behavior toward a college girlfriend, his relationship to sports (he loves basketball, but would rather watch than play), and a variety of books and authors that have provided him intense pleasure.

His stuttering is a topic, too. He explains that his father stammered, but that as his son he took his dad's "halting speech and turned it into a full-blown stutter." Shields got help for his stutter at the University of Iowa, and tells that story, too. He wrote a great piece for his father's ninetieth birthday, but fear got ahold of him, and he never spoke it. Among Shields' many astonishing and beautiful assertions regarding his dad is this one: "He showed me how to love being in my own body, showed me how to love the words that emerged from my mouth and from my typewriter, how to love being myself and not some other self, and this self owes all of that to him."

These are essays that are personal, thoughtful, and satisfying.

I never suspected that David Shields Enough About You, Adventures in Autobiography would be able to take me to the introspective and invigorated terrain I found myself wandering by the time I had reached its close. Anyone who doubts that autobiographical work has the ability to deliver the proverbial "literary goods", or who has mistakenly identified as the exclusive domain of "great fiction" the pleasures, the insights, or the lingering pain we adoringly call "emotional power", has obviously not read Shields' transformative work.
Enough About You is a string of disparate fragmented passages, a protracted collage. Of particular interest to me was the essay on Bill Murray (which alone should be anthology material on the study of humor theory), and a magnetic retelling of the old "I read your journals" teen-love thread. The connections are scattered and loose, sometimes you find yourself reviewing, going back to other bits, or trying to figure why things seem related. Memoir and essay make up a major portion of the content, strung together on the surface only by the mental activity of the reader.
I have to admit, I backpedaled against what I thought was only going to be a lolling stream of rambles, self-conscious childhood reveries and literary cliquishness. That's the postmodern trap, you know: fragmentation (collage) and use of the first person have often been a way to spiral a story into self-obsessed rigor mortis. At the universities and literary circles, these works are often the roadkilled raccoon around which the critics gather and plant their mental maggots for years of discussion. Referencing the self, along with so-called "creative non-fiction", and most other conventional "reality based" postmodernisms are academic buzzings so overused and overstated, any hint of them will usually flick me to a fitful, nervous sleep.
But it didn't take long before I realized that with David Shields, I was seeing the residuals of a different kind of thinking; his work is developed and spicy and poignant and has an uncanny ability to set your insides a-churning. More importantly, it's a lot of fun to read.
The passages are always short and pithy, and they are nearly-every one of them tasty mouthfuls. This is an example of where the "good read" stuff started to sneak in, despite my critical cynicism. Somehow I felt like I was cheating, like the bon-bon wrappers were piling up around me and I was having too much fun.
Shields takes a moment to clarify himself. While giving us a book review, says he loves collage pieces because "they're all madly in love with their own crises." The fragments work themselves back together. He seems to say, "yes, you're doing some of the work, but what did you see?" He shows us, especially critics like myself, that our issues are our own, and what we get from a writer is at least as much about ourselves as it is about what they are offering. He also makes a compelling argument that our greatest qualities are often one in the same with our deepest flaws.
Resist if you must. I did.

One of the central myths that males like to promulgate about themselves is that they're characteristically outer-directed,
concerned with tasks rather than selves, and highly unself-conscious about their purposes and goals in the world. ("I was just looking fast ball," says the slugger; "I just got a good look at the hoop," insists Robert Horry.) In ENOUGH ABOUT YOU, as in his previous fiction and works of creative non-fiction, David Shields is having none of this masculine protest rhetoric. The joke of his latest book's title is that enough has been said about others, and that he's going to take the occasion of this small volume to talk very self-consciously about the world as it's viewed through his eyes. Accordingly, the dust jacket of ENOUGH ABOUT YOU is plastered with photographs of David Shields from age two to the present, and the essays in the book orbit obsessively around the issue of what it means to be David Shields. So who cares what it means to be David Shields?

Shields is writing squarely in the tradition of Jewish-American literature, a central tenet of which was articulated by Saul Bellow: man is capable, Moses Herzog affirmed, of taking on his "bone-breaking burden of selfhood and self-development," and need not surrender to communal imperatives his "poor, squawking, niggardly individuality." Shields's personal "burden of selfhood" has included a lifelong struggle with a stutter that for years of his childhood threatened to utterly silence him, the long, slow death of his mother from cancer, erotic pleasures and humiliating rejections, the trials of becoming a writer and of garnering positive and devastatingly negative book reviews, and, of course, being Jewish. Shields's honesty in negotiating these highly personal terrains throughout ENOUGH ABOUT YOU is probably the book's second greatest virtue--he practically never dodges into the insulating irony other male writers use to get them through passages in which they have to, like it or not, acknowledge that now and then guys actually do feel stuff, that even for men life is constituted of subjectively-experienced
pleasures and pains. The greatest virtue of ENOUGH ABOUT YOU, however, is the precise, exact, and remarkably unconfessional prose through which Shields illuminates his "adventures in autobiography." Shields is convinced that he's not the nation's only narcissist, and he has at his command the direct, colloquial language required to make his excavations of his narcissistic tendencies tell readers much about their own. There's a human being living in the pages of this funny, thoroughly pleasing little book, and he's completely on to himself--and on to us as well. You better read it.

Shields's new book is quite a mix of genres and subjects, and though it purports to be about him, it's really about Shields and society, or society at large, and the things we all do. Shields has covered much ground in his work and it's worth checking out. Reading one of his books is like listening to one Miles Davis album: the individual work is cool, but doesn't represent the range. He's got novels, short stories, and essays. Enough About You is following in the footsteps of Remote, or actually, leading its own way in a mix of essay, fiction, autobiography. My favorite sections here are the short prose poems that occur in the chapters, "Possible Postcards from Rachel, Abroad" and "On Views and Viewing." These are simple moments of revelation highlighted via the text and their relation to each other. Shields is really good at writing these moments and then getting you with the zinger of a last line. Like something you'd find in Flash Fiction. In any case I've enjoyed the opportunity to get to know his work and this book, and recommend it. I've also had the opportunity to interview the author, and if you want to get to know David Shields more, check out the July/August issue of Poets & Writers. David Shields is sly and insightful, and his work will both amuse and impress you.

In this book, 'Enough About You', David Shields combines an original and delightful personal narrative with insightful passages about the difficulties of autobiography. The collage form of the book repeatedly reminded me of the act of memory itself, in which over time life experiences blur into one flowing series of snapshots about the person you used to be, the people you've loved, the experiences you've had and the brief encounters with wisdom that have shaped who you are. Toward the end of the book Shields interrupts himself (not a rare move) and explores the difficulty of telling the story of yourself while still being very much a part of that self. "'Don't you finally want to get outside or yourself?" He questions, "Isn't that finally what this has to be about, getting beyond the blahblahblah or your endless-' Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. Or rather, yes and no. I want to get past myself, of course I do, but the only way I know how to do this is to ride along on my own nerve endings; the only way out is deeper in."(p.133)
Isn't that the truth for all of us who, in the search for our identities, feel like we're drowning in a vague sea of self-centered feelings and perceptions? Shields does not expect us to ignore the tendency of emotion, nostalgia and self-absorption to overwhelm our memories, instead he urges us to dive straight into these parts (and all other parts) of our pasts in search of the moments which truly represent 'you'.

"Enough About You" was a unique treasure for me because it was my first page turning, where's he going next, I can't put it down, experience with a work of non-fiction. I attribute this to the exhilarating energy and rapid tempo of Shields' writing. Sometimes it feels like your reading as quickly as Shields' is thinking and that's an exciting and original experience. I think the book is unusual because it has universal appeal to readers of all ages, backgrounds and curiosities. The work is not about David Shields the writer, its about you-and what could be more interesting?

There are so many autobiographies on the shelves that I hardly even scan the titles anymore; the genre is glutted with personalities and at the same time starving for personality.

Enough About You is a different kind of memoir, not interested in telling the same tired old stories about "how I got to be who I am today," or "what I learned from all of this," it spends much more time trying to capture the feeling of being human, with its awkwardness, uncertainty and absurdity. It's a much more believable book, certainly, and much more honest with the reader and with itself than almost anything else I've ever read.

I recommend it because it breathes new life into a genre that is by and large stuck in a rut. Besides that, it's got some funny parts, too.

This slim, smart, and funny book might at first glance strike you as yet more ironizing and self-advertisement from the hipper precincts of literary formalism. But Shields is a serious writer in the best possible sense of the term. He's set out not merely to remind us yet again of the difficulty of saying anything-especially and particularly about "selves" (our own or anybody's)-- in postmodern times, but to engage that difficulty head on, to make it yield some truth about us in spite of itself. Shields is thinking hard and writing beautifully about what most contemporary writers only sense: That both fiction and non-fiction as represented by the memoir and the essay have credibility problems; that the "truth" contained in fiction has been undermined by its very success at producing verisimilitude; that the veracity of non-fiction-the authenticity of both the authorial subject and its object--has been rendered suspect by its adoption of the story-making machinery of fiction. Enough About You is, for all its humor, feeling, and lightly worn wisdom, a profound attempt to discover a kind of prose that can speak of, through, and beyond those dilemmas. Shields is a pioneering writer, breaking new ground. The future of personal narrative looks a lot like this book.

This is an honest "autobiography," but it's not the sort of honesty that we normally associate with autobiographies. This honesty isn't about getting all of the details right. In fact, Shields admits that some things just seem right to him, regardless of whether or not they actually happened. They seem right to the reader, though, too, and that's where the honesty lies. Shields promises in his prologue that as he presents his own self, he will also "give you you," and he does. We can find ourselves in each chapter - the stories we tell and why we tell them, what we think about ourselves and how we try to communicate that to the world.

Shields does not separate himself or his readers from the process of writing about his life, and I found myself immediately absorbed. I definitely recommend it.

Take the introspection of Montaigne, add healthy dollops of personalized social commentary in the vein of Henry Adams, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, and leaven with sprinklings of humor ala Woody Allen, and you begin to understand the genius of David Shields' Enough About You.

You might ask if this is some kind of joke. But as Robert Frost once noted, "I am never more serious than when I am joking." But Shields' engaging humor -- whether goofing on his own ambitions as writer, as athlete, as child of Jewish liberals -- is at heart an engaging masks for his profoundly deep ambition and serious desire to show us something about both himself and ourselves.

The book is fun to read -- not just as a series of pieces, but as a flowing, lucid narrative examining Shields' various obsessions. Rarely have I read something that so eloquently explores how writers become who they are. I'm not talking about the craft of writing (though Shields is extremely polished), but about the intoxicating scent of desire that enters the soul of an aspiring writer: the goal of making an impact on the world. Through his tales of basketball and school, of his perceptions of both private friends and public icons (the Bill Murray piece is keenly insightful, not just into Murray, but to everything from comedy to acting and why this matters), Shields brings to life George Bernard Shaw's notion that "the man who writes about hismelf and his time is the only man who he writes about all people and all time." It's a delightful book.