David Shields (The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead) once again, in How Literature Saved My Live, tries to convince readers that fiction is dead and that the essay--and perhaps the memoir--are the most authentic genres extant today. In this ongoing crusade, he succeeds in writing personal essays that are clever, entertaining, erudite, funny and genre-bending.
Shields here continues the process of examining, through his writing, every nook and cranny of his psyche. His subjects have ranged from his stutter to his familial relationships, failed love affairs, his take on sports and race--and, in this book, his dogmatic statement that literature is the only stay against oblivion, despair, chaos and the abyss.
What saves all of this from being simply a narcissistic exercise in navel-gazing is that Shields is possessed of a mordant wit and a nicely overstuffed brain. He has read widely. "If you want to write serious books," he says, reflecting on his earlier book Reality Hunger, "you must be ready to break forms." Annie Dillard's The Writing Life, he says, shows us a path to this goal: "She establishes the problem, deepens the problem, suggests 'solutions,' explores the permutations of these solutions, argues against and finally undermines these solutions, returning us to the problem." (Which is, he admits, "pretty much the M.O. of this book as well.")
"I wanted literature to assuage human loneliness," he writes at the end. "Nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn't lie about this--which is what makes it essential." --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.