How David Shields Turned Me Into a U.F.O.

David Shields has just published his 20th book, a rambling collection of essays called Other People: Takes & Mistakes.  Though he acknowledges that the book is in keeping with his metamorphosis from “a writer of novels and short stories to a writer of nonfiction books and personal essays,” he’s quick to add this disclaimer: “(Never mind, for the moment, that I don’t of course believe in the validity of these generic distinctions.)”  Of course the author of Reality Hunger doesn’t believe in the validity of such archaic distinctions.  He has moved beyond all that.

Nevertheless, Other People reads a lot like straight nonfiction that’s firmly grounded in the “real” world, to use the quotation marks mandated by Vladimir Nabokov.  Shields’s real-life source material here includes his family, his college mentors and classmates, baseball and baseball-stadium cuisine, his bad back, his teenage acne, bad reviews of his books, sports clichés and sports movies,  and , and , love and sex and porn stars and ’60s TV shows, and the pleasing remoteness of his current hometown, Seattle.  From its epigraph to its final page, this book is tied together by what Shields calls his “favorite idea”—that “language is all we have to connect us, and it doesn’t, not quite.”