New genre-defying book debates personal impact of literature on author

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David Shields’ crippling stutter pushed him to become a writer to cure his language troubles. It is literature that eventually developed his connection to the world. But in “How Literature Saved My Life,” Shields wonders whether literature has truly saved him, or simply left him with doubt.

In his newest genre-defying release, David Shields, author of critically acclaimed titles such as “The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead” and “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto,” attempts to discern how literature rescues the reader from reality. However, the book actually fails in that regard. Instead, Shields tells his story of becoming a writer in “How Literature Saved My Life” through the voice of his favorite books, and in doing so, succeeds in narrating his tale of artful love, lust and loneliness.

“As a writer, I love language as much as any element in the universe,” writes Shields. “But I also have trouble living anywhere other than in language.”

Shields’ story in “How Literature Saved My Life” is filled with anecdotal memories and strong attachment to literature. The book is written in an odd format, not quite a memoir or a traditional nonfiction piece. It follows Shields’ methodology behind the impact that literature has had in his life and how it has affected his relationships with others. Shields spends the entire book debating the validity of the book’s title while allowing his personal life to dictate the path of the conversation.

The structure of the book helps connect the eight chapters into a coherent mess of thoughts. Within each chapter, Shields uses subheadings that are often repeated throughout the book to tie the work together, such as “Negotiating against myself,” “Life/art” and “Our ground time here will be brief,” which are also individual chapter titles.

Throughout these chapters, Shields covers his life with respect to literature, including handling an awful stutter that he saw as dehumanizing, his roller coaster college (sex) life at Brown University and the evolution of his own writing. The book refuses to follow a strict chronology, but rather digresses when needed. But the reader never feels abandoned. It is a friend’s tale – one worth listening to.

As the title conveys, Shields quotes an enormous catalog of writers, from Sophocles, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov, to close colleagues such as David Foster Wallace, Ben Lerner and Sarah Manguso. While the book presents hundreds of literary titles and ideas, Shields finds a way to make readers feel they have read every story. His analyses are quick and insightful. However, it is what Shields doesn’t say about his life through his own writing but rather through others that best characterizes the author. Shields quotes from Annie Dillard’s “The Writing Life,” “Assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case.”

Shields accomplishes this through his wit and dry humour. The book is often melancholic, but through the graceful intertwining of literary quotes with his own observations, Shields makes a strong argument for how literature simultaneously allows a detour from life, freedom from everyday distractions, and takes from humanity its consciousness and replaces it with doubt.

Shields’ inability to finalize by the end of the book whether literature has indeed saved his life or left him hopeless somewhat detracts from the brilliant conversations that Shields holds with the reader throughout the book. But the fact that the ending comes unresolved may just be a metaphor for Shields’ writing and his fear of saying too little by saying too much.

By the conclusion of “How Literature Saved My Life,” it is clear that here lies an author bereaved and exhilarated by literature. Whether or not the title holds true by the end, Shields’ final product is an excellent and valiant attempt to grant life to the stoic words in a book. Shields departs his tale by writing, “I wanted literature to assuage human loneliness, but nothing can assuage human loneliness. Literature doesn’t lie about this – which is what makes it essential.”

Email Hornbostel at bhornbostel@media.ucla.

Correction: Brendan Hornbostel’s last name was misspelled.