A Handbook for Drowning: Stories - Hardcover

Shields, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679401113 ISBN 13: 9780679401117

Publisher: Knopf, 1991

Synopsis

Interconnected stories deal with Walter, a young man trying to understand his parents, his ideals, and his emotions

About this title

About the Author

David Shields is the internationally bestselling author of more than twenty books, including Reality Hunger (recently named one of the 100 most important books of the last decade by LitHub), The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (New York Times bestseller), Black Planet (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), and Other People: Takes & Mistakes (NYTBR Editors' Choice). The Very Last Interview was published by New York Review Books in 2022.

Shields has published fiction and nonfiction in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Yale Review, Salon, A Public Space, Believer, and Best American Essays. His work has been translated into two dozen languages.

James Franco's film adaptation of I Think You're Totally Wrong: A Quarrel, which Shields co-wrote and co-stars in, was released in 2017. Shields wrote, produced, and directed Lynch: A History, a 2019 documentary about Marshawn Lynch's use of silence, echo, and mimicry as key tools of resistance.

Reviews

Uneven but often alluring stories, though many of them read like outtakes from Dead Languages, Shields's ambitious 1989 novel of a son's growing up under the stressful nurturing of eccentric parents who were also passionately liberal intellectuals. The names here are changed, but the progressive parents reappear--the mother an unflaggingly committed journalist (who, again, will face death by cancer), the father a more rumpled kind of idealist who covers local sports for neighborhood papers and is undyingly fixated on the injustice of the Rosenberg case. As for son Walt Jaffe, the parental combination of high ideals with the vagaries of human misjudgment and weakness has the same confusing impact it had on the son in Dead Languages--and here are 24 elegantly rendered, frequently tormented, and often amusing glimpses of the hypersensitive and thoughtful Walt's early initiations into sex (``Gookus Explains the Eternal Mysteries''; ``A Brief Summary of Ideal Desire''); of his growing awareness of political complexities and failures (``The War on Poverty''; ``The Sixties''; ``War Wounds''); the moral imperatives of pacifism and of death (``The Gun in the Grass as Your Feet''; ``The Sheer Joy of Amoral Creation''); and even of his rather youthful and fictionally somewhat self-consciously belabored marriage (``The Imaginary Dead Baby Sea Gull''; ``The Moon, Falling''). There's no doubt of Shields's richness, energies, and talent, but there's none, either, of his debts here to others--from Leonard Michaels (to whom in fact one piece is dedicated) on through the entropic fictions and satires of Beattie, Barthelme, Salinger, even Hemingway. An offering of compellingly skilled stories, then, but not the wished-for staking out of new terrain. As to the estimable achievement of Dead Languages, what's here is a little bit like finding a plate of hors d'oeuvres after the dinner is already eaten. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Similar in theme to his most recent novel, Dead Languages ( LJ 4/1/89), these linked stories sensitively probe the psychic wounds inflicted by families. They paint a composite portrait of Walt Jaffe, an intelligent, obsessive young man struggling to overcome the effects of his parents' emotional repressiveness and his mother's early death. Stories such as "The Gun in the Grass at Your Feet" and "The Sheer Joy of Amoral Creation" explore the painful roots of his difficulties. Others, like "Heart of a Dybbuk"--a story purportedly written by Walt--portray an adult attempting to break through from detachment to emotional engagement. While most are effective individually, the stories have a much greater cumulative impact. In the end, A Handbook for Drowning may be best appreciated as a kind of episodic novel. For most collections.
- Lawrence Rungren, Bedford Free P.L., Mass.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679401113
• ISBN 13: 9780679401117
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 178