David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

Benna’s realization that “sloppiness was generally built into the language” tarnishes for her every act of communication, but it also causes her to conjure up pillow talk with Georgianne, her make-believe daughter: “ ‘Do you want to?’ she squeaks, in imitation of someone, something, I don’t know what, and she tweaks my nose, my skinny merink, my bony pumpkin.” Pure love, I’ve found, is pure language. Feeling becomes sound.

Love is a long, close scrutiny

AMY HEMPEL’S “WEEKEND” ends happily, but it has a very carefully orchestrated undertone of sadness, even despair. The story is divided neatly in half: the calm and the storm-for-now-averted. The first section is an evocation of the absolute epitome of middle-class familial contentment and pleasure: the weekend, kids, dogs, softball, drinks. There are the faintest hints of trouble: a broken leg and the dogs’ “mutiny,” but all is more or less joy.

Section break. Time passes.

Postprandial activities of no consequence: the adults smoke, throw horseshoes (a near ringer; this much heartbreak I can live with), pick ticks off sleeping dogs, repel mosquitoes. We’re on what feels like Long Island, and the men are readying to return to the city for work the next morning. When the men kiss the women good night—their whiskers scratching the women’s cheeks—the women want the men not to shave but to “stay,” which is the story’s perfect final word, conveying both sweetness but also the command of a dog’s owner to a dog and the strong implication that sooner than later, the bewhiskered men will wind up like the dogs, straying, “barking, mutinous.”

Here, right now, this is gorgeous. Please let’s keep it so . As soon as I think this/say this, I’ve ruined paradise.

Real life

IN Chronic City , rich people inevitably outbid everyone else at the last second on vaselike objects called “chaldrons.” When you plug them in to make them appear, there’s actually nothing there. Jonathan Lethem’s novel takes place in a cauldron of the mind that’s an impossible amalgam of George W. S. Trow, Jean Baudrillard, Philip K. Dick, Slavoj Žižek, Vonnegut. There’s a staggering amount of plot, but it’s never not functioning as metaphor. The narrative is never not getting at the frenzy of the visible—at delusions of innocence in our unprecedented era of prosperity, the sterilized bubble of privilege that we inhabit and that has never before been remotely encountered on the planet. The book is about how this privilege has become an extraordinarily deadening and alienating force, detaching me from what’s real and pushing me into a dream state. Life comes to feel hypothetical, until it suddenly doesn’t.

I see here Lethem’s way rather than my way to attempt to reaccess the real by pulling chaldrons from our eyes. I’ve long been fascinated by what are now nearly daily (hourly?) media crisis hiccups, e.g., in Chronic City , a giant burrowing/boring tiger: “It’s pretty goddamn funny that everyone calls it a tiger in the first place; even those of us who know better have fallen into the habit, a testament to what Arnheim likes to call the power of popular delusions and the madness of crowds.” Rather than do a Trow-like analysis of such events, Lethem embodies and narrativizes his understanding. Everything, everything plugs, as it were, into the hologram-like quality of contemporary existence, falseness, artifice, deceit. “I was to briefly reenter a dream I’d idealized. One of life’s oases, those moments that happen less often than we want to believe. And are only known in retrospect, after the inevitable wreck and rearrangements have come.”

In a Times op-ed Lethem wrote several years ago—about D. F. Wallace’s suicide, the Iraq war, and Dark Knight , but even more about how “if everything is broken, perhaps it is because for the moment we like it better that way”—he somehow captured my ineffable lostness. Aurora, anyone?

Real life

ROBIN HEMLEY’S NOVEL The Last Studebaker is an exhaustive meditation on the ways in which people invest their emotional life in things—in, as the protagonist, Lois, says, “something that needed her,” although the automobile is, to me, very nearly the main character of the book, which connects driving to the yearning both to escape home and to find home. Over and over again, pain gets associated with where people live and so they need to travel, not to find happiness but to get away from the material objects that seem to have absorbed all their owners’ sadnesses. Virtually every major character is strongly but subtly tied to this idea: from Gail’s driver’s ed classes to Willy’s tinkering with his cars to Henry’s buying a car at auction to Lois’s expeditions. Exchanges between people inevitably occur with some kind of barrier (phone, microphone, garage sale bric-a-brac) between them. Lois encounters a trio of salespeople—at a clothing store, a restaurant, and a garage sale—all of whom refuse to acknowledge that any sort of meaningful interaction could possibly occur. This culminates in Lois’s explanation of the Midwest’s brand of repression: it’s better to blow your brains out than acknowledge you’re ever having a less than good day (paging Laurie …).

Hemley defines being human not as knowledge of mortality or as the ability to laugh but as the capacity to break out of your routine. Am I still capable of the latter? I think so. The Last Studebaker is related for me to Ted Mooney’s Easy Travel to Other Planets , in which the capacity to travel becomes indistinguishable from the inability to love, and Jayne Anne Phillips’s Machine Dreams , with its collection of unhappy houses and the corroded cars by which people attempt, unsuccessfully, to make escapes from these unhappy houses—

Why the human animal is so sad

ALL WEEK LONG, my sister and I would think and talk about Batman or Get Smart or The Addams Family— whatever the show was that year—and on the night of the show we’d make sugar cookies and root beer floats, then set up TV trays. Immediately after the show, we’d talk about how much we hated that it was over and what agony it was going to be to wait an entire week for it to be on again, whereas the show itself was usually only so-so, hard to remember, over before you knew it.

Senior year of high school, my best friend and I had to spend at least one night a week hanging around the San Francisco airport. Why? The dirty magazines we flipped through at the newsstand and the sexy stewardesses tugging their luggage like dogs on a leash, but more than that it was everybody marching with such military urgency to their destinations, as if everywhere—everywhere in the world: Winnipeg, Tokyo, Milwaukee—were to be desired.

In my late twenties, I admired the Boy Scout belt a friend of mine was wearing (I liked the way it was a joke about uniformity at the same time it simply looked good), and when I asked where he got it, he said, to my astonishment, that it was his original Boy Scout belt. He still had it. He could still wear it. He was very skinny, stylish, good-looking. I never made it past the Cub Scouts and even in the Cubs failed to distinguish myself. Slipknots and shiny shoes have never been very high priorities for me. Still, I wanted a Boy Scout belt and thought it would be easy. I stopped in at a Boy Scout office, where I was told that BSA clothing and accessories could be purchased only by Scouts or troop leaders. I went so far as to schedule an interview for a troop leader position until, fearing accusations of pedophilia, I ended the charade. Visits to several stores led me to the boys’ department of JCPenney, which carried Boy Scout uniforms in their catalogue and told me I could order a belt. I wore it once, maybe twice, with jeans, then tossed it into the back of the closet.