Reality Hunger: A Manifsto by David Shields

This book, published in 2010, is promoted at "An open call for new literary and other art forms to match the complexities of the twenty-first century." It consists of 618 numbered items, some as sort as a sentence, a few as long as a page and a half, in 26 chapters. Shields has published three novels, and collections of essays; Reality Hunger was his tenth book.

Shields makes the case that because memory is fallible memoir and autobiography is actually form of fiction. Moreover, because words are not things and because writers choose the words they use, decide the order in which they fall, shape the sentences and paragraphs, nothing we write is "real" in the sense that a horse, a house, or a noose is real. Yet, "Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art." Shields argues that the well-formed novel with plot, characters, description and action is as passe as Dickens or Trollop. Today's best fiction is (or should be) a collage, a mix tape, a mashup of quotes, letters, advertisements, news stories—bits and pieces that serve the author's vision.

As is Reality Hunger itself. I did not realize until I was more than halfway through the book (this reflects both my traditional mindset—blinkers—and my naiveté) that the book is virtually entirely  snippets from other sources that Shields has clipped and arranged. It took me a while to catch on because the individual numbered items are not cited and would not have been, Shields tells us, had not the publisher's lawyers insist he add an appendix with the sources. The book is a collage, a mix tape, a mashup.

It is also thought-provoking. The quotes Shields has found and the way he has ordered them so that they play off one another, resonate, convey more (or different) meaning in their new context is extraordinary. But to give you a sample of the quotes taken virtually at random without the context:

77. We all need to begin figuring our how to tell a story for the cell phone. One thing I know: it's not the same as telling a story for a full-length DVD.

112. Memoir is a construct used by publishers to niche-market a genre between fact and fiction, to counteract and assimilate with reality shows.

421. I don't know what it's like inside you and you don't know what it's like inside me. A great book allows me to leap over that wall: in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness, I feel human and unalone.

573. To write only according to the rules laid down by masterpieces signifies that one is not a master but a pupil.

574. He who follows another will never overtake him.

575. You can always recognize the pioneers by the number of arrows in their back.

I believe that anyone who is serious about writing should buy, read, highlight, and think about what Shields has produced. What in it makes sense? What doesn't? Why?

Bark by Lorrie Moore

Lorrie Moore is such an accomplished writer and her new collection of short stories, Bark, has received such positive reviews—reviews with which I concur and which I cannot elevate—I thought I would simply lift sentences from the book in an attempt to convey Moore's brilliance and engage your interest.

"Ira had been divorced six months and still couldn't get his wedding ring off. His finger had swelled doughily around it—a combination of frustrated desire, unmitigated remorse, and misdirected ambition, he said to friends. 'I'm going to have to have my entire finger surgically removed.'" —The first sentences of the first story, Debarking

"Every woman I knew here drank—daily. In rejecting the lives of our mothers, we found ourselves looking for stray volts of mother love in the very places they could never be found: gin, men, the college, our own mothers, and one another. I was the only one of my friends—all of us academic transplants, all soldiers of art stationed on a far-off base (or, so we imagined it)—who hadn't had something terrible happen to her yet." —A random sentence from The Juniper Tree

"Although Kit and Rafe had met in the peace movement, marching, organizing, making no nukes signs, now they wanted to kill each other. They had become, also, a little pro-nuke. Married for two decades of precious, precious life, she and Rafe seemed currently to be partners only in anger and dislike, their old lusty love mutated to rage." —Paper Losses

"He saw now that her fingernails really were plastic, that the hand really was a dry frozen claw, that the face that had seemed intriguingly exotic had actually been scarred by fire and only partially repaired. He saw how she was cloaked in a courageous and intense hideosity. The hair was beautiful, but now he imagined it was probably a wig. Pity poured through him: he'd never never felt so sorry for someone." —Foes

"Then as something caught fire between them, and love secured its footing inside her. when she awoke next to him with damp knots in the back of her hair like she'd never experienced before, the room full of the previous night's candles and the whiff of weed, his skin beside her as silky calico of cool and warm, and as they both needed to eat and eat some more together, she began to feel OK that he sold drugs. If he did. What the hell? At least there was that. At least he did something." —Wings

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is quoted on the jacket: "Moore cannot write a bad sentence, cannot create poor characters, cannot tell flat ho-hum stories. When she's good, she's very, very good; when she's bad, she's good." I agree and wish only that I could do the same.

This past week I went to an author talk at RJ Julia Booksellers a wonderful independent bookstore in Madison, CT. Jenny Milchman talked about her experiences as a writer and her new novel, Ruin Falls, and Carla Buckley talked about hers and her novel, The Deepest Secret.

The two authors, who are friends, are on a book tour to publicize the new books. All but three of the perhaps two dozen members of the audience were women of a certain age, which says, I believe, something about who buys and reads books (or who buys and reads Milchman's and Buckley's books). While they talked somewhat about the inspirations about their new books, they spent more time talking about their experiences as writers.

Milchman wrote nine novels before she was able to attract an agent for the last, which became Cover of Snow. It took 21 months between the publisher's acceptance to publication, during which time the publishing machine was in operation: copy editing, cover design, internal design, obtaining cover blurbs, sending out galleys to bookstores and reviewers, setting up press events, etc., etc. During the 21 months, Milchman was supposed to be writing another novel so that a year after the first’s publication, another would be available for the market. Her agent thought Milchman's novel number 7 might sell based on the sale of number 8, and Milchman wrote number 9. The publisher rejected both numbers 7 and 9, so Ruin Falls is her 10th.

Their talks reinforced a lesson I already knew: publisher want to slot writers into a certain niche. No one—not publishers, not booksellers, not readers—wants to be confused over what a writer is like. This is a Jody Picoult, a Daniele Steele, a J.K. Rowling book. And a brand-name writer has an audience that will buy everything they publish without reserve. The editor's job is to find writers who will regularly produce manuscripts that are similar enough for readers to buy without being shocked by unfamiliar content.

I asked Milchman and Buckley how much editing their books received from their agents and their editors. They both said they had extensive edits from both.

I asked if they signed multi-book deals. Milchman had not. Carla had signed a two-book deal. For her second book, she created nine proposals—detailed outlines of the stories, character descriptions, back stories—all of which the publisher rejected. Almost in desperation, she came up with another idea, submitted a two-page proposal the publisher bought and which became The Deepest Secret.

I asked about titles (a subject about which I am struggling at this moment) and they were able to tell good stories about the problem of finding an acceptable title. Milchman’s editor had real reservations about Ruin Falls, but that was the working title and although Milchman suggested a gazillion other possibilities, the original became the title almost by default. Buckley had many of the same problems with one of her books. The foreign editions of that book all have very different titles because the local publishers were no more happy with the working title than the American publisher. 

After the author talk, I chatted with the bookstore staff. I asked how long the store keeps a title in stock. It might be months—or in the case of a classic, years—or it could be as short as a week. Self-published books have virtually no place in bookstores because their authors are not prepared to send books on consignment and pay the shipping to and from the stores. The stores generally have no basis on which to buy a self-published book, no reviews in Publishers Weekly, no advance reading copies, none of the marketing support that a major publisher offers. Even if a bookstore were willing to buy self-published books outright, how would the staff know what will sell?

All in all, an exceptionally stimulating and interesting evening.

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

First, like many haiku, the meaning of Ozeki's title can shift as you think about it. It can mean "a tale or the present; until some other arrangement is made." Or it can mean "a tale for the time creature; for the living thing." Both apply.

Ozeki, a novelist who has published two other books and lives part time in British Columbia, writes half the novel's chapters in the third person from the point of view of Ruth, a novelist who lives on a small Canadian island north of Vancouver with her husband Oliver. In her acknowledgements, Ozeki thanks her husband Oliver.

Half the novel's chapters are written in the first person by Nao Yasutani, a 16-year-old Japanese girl living in Tokyo after growing up mostly in Sunnyvale, CA, where her father was a computer programmer. Nao is writing in English, but her diary contains Japanese words that Ozeki helpfully footnotes.

Back in Tokyo after the dot-com bust, Nao's father is suicidal and Nao finds refuge for a summer at a temple in the north where her 104-year-old great-grandmother, Jiko, is a Zen Buddhist nun. Jiko's son, Haruki, was conscripted into the Japanese military in 1943 and trained as a suicide plane pilot.

At the beginning of the novel, Ruth discovers a Hello Kitty lunch box in the beach wrack along the shore of her island. It contains Nao's diary and her great uncle's letters (written in French so the NCOs training the conscripts cannot read them). Ruth has been trying to write a memoir for ten years, and becomes caught up in Nao's diary, which involves bullying at school, her father's suicide attempts, her summer at her great-grandmother's temple, and more. Ruth also reads Haruki's secret French diary.

I hope these shards of information I've just sketched hint the complexity and richness of A Tale for the Time Being. Given my own experience with Japan, other things I've read, and Ozeki's footnotes, she produced a sense throughout the novel that this is what's it's like to live on a small Canadian island in the Northwest, to be a Japanese schoolgirl who has been contaminated by her life in America, to be a peace-loving 19-year-old conscripted by a monstrous war machine, to be a 46-year-old Japanese father unable to find a job, to be an elderly Zen nun. This is what it's like. These incidents are entirely possible. These are the tragedies of history . . . and of human character.

It includes the problem of time: What you are reading now came into existence in the past. I myself may no longer exist when you read these words. And if I were writing to ask for help, as Nao does even as she has no idea who might read her words, what would you be able to do? Particularly if you are on one side of the Pacific and I am on the other? If you are a novelist, you would make a story.

All I can recommend is that you find and immerse yourself in Ozeki's novel for a deeply moving and thought-provoking experience.

Good Americans by Tejas Desai

Good Americans is an interesting if flawed collection of nine short stories plus an Introduction designed to promote the book and justify the author's publishing it through his own New Wei Literary Movement and Collective. According to his website, Desai, the son of Indian immigrants, graduated from the Queens College MFA program with a degree in creative writing and literary translation in 2009.

The stories include "Old Guido," a first-person account by an elderly bigot (he reminded me of a nasty Archie Bunker) of his involvement with a teenage Hispanic girl; "The Apprentice" in which an adjunct professor becomes entranced by a Chinese masseuse; "The Mountain" in which two old friends use the occasion of a hike to try to catch up and reconnect; "Malta: A Love Story" in three parts follows a much-abused southern girl and three college buddies—an African-American, an Indian-American, and a White-American; "Bridget's Brother" reports a dinner between three young people, one of whom particularly loathsome; and in "Dhan's Debut" a journalist pursues a charismatic lawyer. The title story, "Good Americans," told in the first person, dramatizes the last night of a crippled Iraq veteran.

These are stories primarily of young men who do drugs, hold marginal and dead-end jobs (although many of them are college graduates). I found the most convincing to be the sons of Indian immigrants and who are trying to be both good sons and make their way in this country. In the introduction, Desai writes in the persona of a literary agent who is presenting this book, "Here was a fresh voice from the darkest recesses of the soul, a racist against all races who was aware of his affliction but was unashamed...here was a portrait of a stained and scarred America, full of the guts and glory of our nation: of greed, racism, buffoonery, elitism, false honor, straight out of the pages of Mark Twain or a Sinclair Lewis novel, but set in the 21st century, today." Well, perhaps some reader will find that.

Unfortunately, others will find that the book badly needed an editor. It is wordy, and often unconvincing. I felt the characters were often doing things not because it was in their makeup to do them but because the author wanted them to do it to make a point. Sixty-five-year-old Riny at first has only contempt for 15-year-old Taina. Then he finds beaten and unconscious in a Queens park, and not only takes her home but eventually buys her a cell phone. When she initiates sex and offers her anus, Riny is too squeamish for that, but not too squeamish to find a condom and take her virginity. A southern sheriff tells the non-white college boys not to look too hard for the missing Malta: "This ain't your little college town. We still hear talk about lynchings here. And especially given you're looking for your white girlfriend, A definite no-no."

In any event, this is presented as Volume I of "The Human Tragedy" and with more experience, Desai will in future volumes be able to smooth some of his writing's rough edges while retaining the passion and vision.

Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt

Let me start with the information that can put certain readers off: Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt is not new; it was first published in 1981. It is a young adult novel; the POV character is a 13-year-old girl. There is no sex, no real violence, and no villains, vampires, zombies, or supernatural beings. Still interested?

Homecoming is still in print. It is (my opinion) an engaging, entirely plausible story that holds the reader's attention (this reader's attention) from page 1 to page 372. (Did I mention that it's a thick book, but one you don't want to end?)

In the book's third paragraph, the mother of Dicey Tiillerman, 13; James, 11; Maybeth, 9; and Sammy, 6, tells the children to be good and to listen to Dicey. She walks away from their old car and disappears into the crowd at a Peewauket, RI, shopping mall. Their father had walked out on their mother shortly after Sammy's birth and the family had been living in what sounds like a shack on Cape Cod. When their mother lost her job, she decided to take the children to their wealthy aunt in Bridgeport, but, we readers come to realize, she breaks down entirely in Peewauket and abandons her children.

I think that Voigt did something very, very difficult. She managed to create four children, all individual (Dicey is the resourceful one, James the smart one, Maybeth the shy, silent one, Sammy the stubborn one), put them in an extraordinary situation, and have them behave the way I am willing to believe these children would act in the circumstances.

Once Dicey realizes they've been abandoned—their mother has vanished and she's not coming back—she decides they will walk to Bridgeport to the aunt's house. Perhaps they'll find their mother already there. They have hardly any money (obtaining money is a recurring and realistic thread throughout the book), and the distance does not look so far on a road map. The first half of the book covers the children's adventures on the road and what happens when they actually reach their aunt's Bridgeport house. It is hardly a spoiler to tell you that the house is not the refuge the children had expected. Nor is it the hell another writer might have created. Voigt is too subtle and the situation is in some ways worse because it is so credible.

The challenges the children meet and the way they overcome them (or not) are all believable. They meet real dangers including well-meaning people who would, in fact, cause them harm. They also meet decent people who help them. In a way, I am sorry I could not have read Homecoming when I was a young teen because I would have known children just like Dicey, James, Maybeth, and Sammy and would have been reading the book under my covers with a flashlight because I didn't want to leave their company. Nevertheless, even as an adult I'm glad a friend recommended it and I did not simply dismiss it as being for kids.

Sometimes Things Go Horribly Wrong by Adam Matson

Adam Matson has published an interesting collection of short stories in Sometimes Things Go Horribly Wrong. He majored in cinema and photography at Ithaca College with a concentration in screenwriting and says he has written around a dozen feature-length screenplays.

The 19 stories in the collection—all of them I found interesting—sometimes reminded me of exercises, a writer's efforts to try out different forms, points of view, voices, possibilities. Some seemed very slight. "A Typical Day at the Office" describes in considerable detail J.P. Waterman's life as an "office drone;" he comes to his cubical, fills his day; and goes home. That's pretty much it.

A few of the stories are quite short; "Beneath the Overpass" is three printed pages that begin, "Every time I drive out of the city I see him. I turn onto the highway that will take me home. I glance down. Beneath the overpass I see him standing. Same place, every time." A real man? A statue? Or an illusion.

Matson has two stories, "The Yellow School Bus" and "The Man in the Green Car" that taps nicely into unreasoned panic. What is it like to be eight years old and watch the school bus slaughter your neighbor students as it comes to get you? What if you know you are being followed by a malevolent man as you leave your girlfriend's house sometime after midnight? Matson shows you.

Many of the stories are truly imaginative: While a number of skanky people glide through Dallas airport security, the TSA detains and harasses an innocent, productive Muslim passenger. A middle-aged man considering his life discovers that people he thought he remembered never existed. A professional poker-playing cheat gets into the wrong game. A young man who has a unusual relationship with fire almost kills his girlfriend and himself in trying to attract her attention.

The lead story, "Dream On," exemplifies the book's title. A middle-aged construction worker on his way back to his worksite in his pickup innocently offers a ride to a teen-age girl. He is only doing a good deed, but things go horribly wrong. I found the story so powerful I was not sure I wanted to read the rest of the book. As it turns out, I am glad I did.