Reality Hunger: A Manifesto

We've suddenly entered an age of choices - as least it seems sudden in retrospect - and this book is not so much a manifesto as a proclamation of the author's personal choices regarding literature.It seems here that society suffers, not from an overdose of reality, but from a desperate need for a dose of such magnitude.Reality Hunger is a collection of loosely linked epigrams, sound bites, and personal vignettes that extol Shields' perspective on the field of fiction versus non-fiction. The best way to depict this book is though Shields' own pithy statements:"Painting isn't dead. The novel isn't dead. They just aren't as central to the culture as they once were.""Everything processed by memory is fiction.""Since to live is to make fiction, what need to disguise the world as another, alternate one?""...I still feel that the writer and the reader can jettison the pages leading to the epiphany.""I want a literature built entirely out of contemplation and revelation."The above bon-bons are only a sampling of where Shields wants to take us in this book. Some of his insights are philosophical, some leaning heavily on cutting-edge literary theory. But most, to this reader, are his wave at the flag of social trends.He wants to skip the traditional story in literature - this bores him - and get right to the depth of what story has to tell us. He wants this to be concise enough to read on one's iPhone while on hold between phone calls.He favors - and here I offer little in the way of argument - something he calls the lyric essay, a literary form that presents the "hungry pursuit of solutions to problems."This is the way an over-caffeinated world wants to work today. But is Shields' manifesto viable? I think not. While the body of humanity seems to feel that instant gratification isn't quite quick enough, such urges hardly resolve problems, whether they be personal or political.Literature works only because it presents specific cases of the human condition in ways that lead us to understand that condition in a much more general sense. Fiction, poetry, and the newbie on the block - non-fiction - get our attention, despite Shields' condescensions, because they entertain. This isn't my thought - this idea is as old as story itself.Reality Hunger is hardly an answer to such yens - it's Shields' way of attempting to cut though the discord of a world in flux, a world perhaps too full of choices of all sorts - perhaps a symptom of a new Axial Age in the making - and arrive at the businessman's bottom line. While we'll all likely to continue to debate the nature of Truth - that's with a capital "T" - we won't find an enduring literary presentation in such a pell-mell rush to the depths of understanding.Despite all this, I like much of what Shields says here. His is a creative, parsing mind - and we see too little of that today. I can only wish he'd hadn't felt the dogs of trendiness nipping so feverishly at his heels.

If you have to go back a page or two, if you have to reread the last sentence or paragraph two or three times, more slowly, sometimes aloud, you are approaching Nirvana. IMO this is not an easy trip, relative to Shields' other writings, but any esoteric puzzle asking you to clarify your own thoughts is certainly a gripping evening's read. whether 15 minutes or 1.5 hours. Do it!

Shields gives writers and readers a cause long overdue as he argues that writers should take ownership of ideas and words before lawyers and corporations usurped the freedom of expression. Shakespeare, Whitman and Hemingway would probably cheer as their phrases and paragraphs would be used freely without citations and attribution. Students do it all the time, but they call it plagiarism.

This is not an easy read. And it's infuriating for many reasons. These are good things. The fact that we need an author to slap us around like this is a sign of the times. But so is the fact that a writer can do this, do it well and just happen to open up new doors and windows. It's also an awkward read, made even more awkward by the Kindle. And to add my meta-media-technological experience, I actually read it on Kindle for the iPad. I forced myself to read it in sequence like a real book, without flipping to the appendix to find out who these quotes are from. Maybe that made it harder.Having read the book proper, the problem then became bouncing from the appendix to the actual text back and forth ... a miserably slooow exercise on the Kindle/iPad. A real book would've been a hell of a lot easier.There's a mysterious feeling to the voice of it all. At times it's uneven and other times hangs together like the lyrical essays he cites. The voice seems almost disembodied. Add to that, a portion of the book addresses the voice of the author in fiction and non-fiction, character and first person, narrative vs. essay. Around some of those points I had to re-read passages several times to absorb the layers of meaning or just understand what he was saying. To me, I prefer that challenge.Regardless, we know where David Shields stands and he's on firm ground, shouting from the mountaintop.

This book is a manifesto, a call to arms, a war on the novel that no longer matters. This book encourages a new form, a novel that is lived art and art lived. Shields wants AutoFiction that disguises itself as a novel and novels that barely disguise themselves as autobiography. Nothing in this world of 24 hour news and melting time is real, all nonfiction is, in fact, fiction. Nothing remembered is true, our memory is the greatest author of fantastic fiction we could ever hope to read. Go out and live your art and bring back the results, put them on the page and see your art truly lived. This book is a great read and I encourage anyone who dreams of writing a book someday to pick it up and commit this treatise to heart. Go buy it now!

This book is interesting, but the central idea is oversold and becomes dogma which was for me off putting.

A wonderful book, illuminating on a range of subjects from the novel to reality TV. Unpicking the common threads of popular culture and art with dazzling aphoristic clarity and amusing disregard for attribution (which is entirely the point).

a fun read

Excellent!

A life-changing book. For anyone interested in the future of art, music or writing, this is a must.