David Shields - How Literature Saved My Life

In the middle of the novel, Vollmann appends to the conclusion of several sections the words “The End,” as if to suggest the ceaselessness of the butterfly boy’s capacity for self-inflicted punishment. After acting out “endless” scenarios of humiliation and loss, “the husband,” who may have AIDS, returns in the final chapter to San Francisco, self-consciously trying—and failing—to play his spousal role: “Sometimes he’d see his wife in the back yard gardening, the puppy frisking between her legs, and she’d seem so adorable there behind window-glass that he ached, but as soon as she came in, whether she shouted at him or tried desperately to please him, he could not feel. He could not feel! ” Reading this extraordinarily intimate book about the butterfly boy’s incapacity for ordinary intimacy, I couldn’t identify more closely with him if I crawled inside his skin.

Other people

E. M. CIORAN: “The universe is a solitary space, and all its creatures do nothing but reinforce its solitude. In it, I have never met anyone, I have only stumbled across ghosts.”

A day unlike any other

ILEAVE THE DOOR slightly ajar, turning the switch on and off for twenty seconds until a shadow of gray fills the room. Wet skin on cold glass. I close the door, but the hall light creases the bottom of the door. Shutting my eyes and turning off the light, I try to imagine what broken glass would sound like in the dark.

A day like any other

SCHOPENHAUER: “Suicide thwarts the attainment of the highest moral aim by the fact that, for a real release from the world of misery, it substitutes one that is merely apparent.”

A day like any other

NABOKOV: “I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.”

Other people

MY FRIEND MICHAEL, who became a widower seven years ago at fifty, emailed me, “I keep hearing the same advice from different people, most recently my sister and my therapist: don’t isolate yourself. I have tendencies in that direction, especially in recent years, and I know it can be bad. When we discussed Zuckerberg’s anti-social impulses, you said writers can’t be isolated for too long because their subject matter is people. I agree. Don’t you think that right now, though, in order to finish my new book, it’s fine for me to be somewhat isolated?”

I wrote back, “It’s a good sign that you wrote this note, since if you were really tumbling into free fall, such questions wouldn’t even register for you. You’re working on your book, which is coming into harbor after its years-long journey at sea; I’d say, if you feel like you’re on a good rhythm, by all means keep at it. We all understand, or at least I do. When I mentioned Zuckerberg, I wasn’t covertly sending you a message. If anything, I was speaking about and to myself. It appeals to me as well to be as impressively focused as he is (remember, too, though, he’s only twenty-eight). But I’ve built my life in such a way as to make sure that I don’t ever get trapped again in my own private Wallingford. Have tried it—doesn’t work for me. I do think there is value for you now in semi-impermeable iso tank, but perhaps you could/should come up for air a little more frequently?”

Our ground time here will be brief

IN History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life , Jill Bialosky asserts her identity as a living person: wife, mother, writer, editor. She says it over and over again. It becomes a chant, then a mantra. She uses the coincidence of her younger sister Kim’s suicide and her own failed pregnancies to convey how quickly hope dwindles when you discover that the world can kill you. Kim, a young, sweet, beautiful girl with no history of mental illness, is hardly the brooding Slipknot teen I was expecting. Jill suggests that suicides are a casualty of natural selection—which is a survivor’s theory, a wall erected against death. “Sisters are mirrors; we see parts of ourselves in each other,” she says, conveying her culpability, her fear, her hauntedness. I thought that people who killed themselves were different from everyone else, and I was wrong . Jill sounds as if she’s still deeply in shock. All her memories of Kim are exceptional, tender, but poisoned a little. Why did this happen? How could I let this happen? Could I have prevented this from happening? The questions are a kind of torture; trying to answer them is the only distraction. She looks through the police, coroner, and toxicology reports just to learn what her sister was wearing—a small, gruesome, but ultimately answerable question. On one page, Jill compares Kim’s death to a Shakespearean tragedy; on the next, she writes about the death of her son’s goldfish—the impossibility of pinning down what she can’t fathom. For her, it’s not an intellectual exercise. It’s life and death. Don’t trust what you think you know about another person . In the wake of Kim’s death, Jill is hyperaware of the sadness of others, of how lightly we all tread.

When I finished the book, I picked up my phone and called Michael just to say Hey man, what’s up, how ya doin’?

Real life

IT’S OFTEN SAID, with some justification, that most novelists have, finally, only one story to tell and that, in book after book, they ring endless changes on a single essential narrative. For more than thirty years, Frederick Barthelme has been exploring the same material (marriage, divorce, middle-aged male ennui), the same territory (Southern suburbia), and similar characters (overeducated protagonists in dead-end jobs and their wry, weary wives and ex-wives and sassy young girlfriends).

Barthelme’s ninth book, The Brothers , is told from the astringent point of view of Del Tribute, who moves from Houston to Biloxi “because he’d been given a condominium, outright, by his ex-wife’s rich father, a going-away present. It was less than a month since the divorce papers were final.” When he arrives in Biloxi, Del discovers that his brother, Bud, has left to pursue an exceedingly vague “movie thing” in Los Angeles. Waiting for the tenant of his condominium to move out, Del stays with and comes perilously close to falling in love with Bud’s wife, Margaret.

The real romance of the novel, though, is between Del, a forty-four-year-old stereo salesman, and Jen, a twenty-four-year-old exhibitionist and satirist who infosurfs Compuserv for mordant wire service stories for Blood & Slime Weekly , the one-page “Hi-Speed Terrorzine” that she posts around town (it’s 1993). When Del says he doesn’t want to have sex, Jen says, “Yeah, neither do I. I’ve had my sex for the year. Let’s forget it. You want to watch TV? You want a sandwich? You want to play Crazy Eights?” (Laurie’s and my favorite recent “activity”: immersing ourselves in DVD after DVD of The Sopranos , The Wire , The Singing Detective , Brideshead Revisited , Friday Night Lights , Breaking Bad . Don’t let it ever end, we practically pray to the screen. Don’t let’s ever die.)

When Bud returns from Los Angeles, he and Del and Margaret and even Jen make much ado throughout the rest of the novel about Del’s earlier flirtation with Margaret. This proves to be something of a MacGuffin, as the novel’s true subject is Del’s attempt to reclaim his presence in the world by seeing it as breathtaking, as beautiful. In the opening paragraph, “it’d quit raining, and the sunlight was glittery as he crossed the bridge over the bay, but his fellow travelers didn’t seem to notice the light.” When Del and Jen are at the Singing River Mall, “Del thought it was beautiful. ‘Nobody really gets this,’ he said. ‘Nobody sees how gorgeous this is or knows why.’ ” At another point, Del says about storms that “they transform everything instantly. It’s like suddenly you’re in a different world, and the junk of your life slides away and you’re left with this rapture, this swoon of well-being and rightness. You get the world in its amazing balance.”