Remote
David Shields.
Alfred A. Knopf.
New York, 1996
Hardcover (206 pages) - $22.00
Sheldon Robert Walcher
REMOTE, THE FOURTH BOOK by critically acclaimed fiction writer
David Shields, is both brilliant and bizarre, hilarious and touching.
Defying most attempts at genre classification, it exists simultaneously as
autobiography, cultural analysis, film criticism, social documentary, and
reportage in the wildest traditions of New Journalism. In fact, the
question of precisely what this book is looms large enough that Shields
attempts to explain the project in the Prologue: "This book is not
concerned with the psychodynamics of the American nuclear family. It is
neither a coming-of-age novel nor a love story. It is a self-portrait
given over to a single subject and splintered into fifty-two pieces: I'm
reading my life as if it were an allegory, an allegory about
Remoteness, and finding evidence wherever I can."
This extended meditation on "Remoteness" includes such topics
as the nature of Oprah Winfrey, the values communicated through car bumper
stickers, the essence of high school popularity, the state of professional
sports, and the character of sexual desire in postmodern America.
Structurally, the "splintered pieces" of the book actually link up to form
longer shards, not quite narrative strands, that resurface at odd
intervals throughout, interspersed with photographs from Shields'
childhood and publicity shots of famous celebrities. The effect is
somewhat like channel surfing on late night cable TV, with some sections
naturally segueing into the next, others coming as startling contrast to
what has come before.
One such narrative shard is "Always," a witty collection of
one-liners about the media: "A TV movie is always based upon a true story,
always features actors and actresses who are more attractive than their
real-life models, and is always less well structured than the true story
on which it was based." Shields is even funnier when he rages against
writers and critics: "The creative process is always depicted as an
unfathomably mysterious, unbearably grueling endeavor, and writers are
always depicted (always depict themselves) as beautiful losers stumbling
around in the metaphysical night...If a growing-up novel is told in the
first person, it is always-with or without cause for comparison-compared
to Catcher in the Rye...When critics have absolutely nothing to say about
writer X's sixth novel, they always say that it burnishes writer X's
reputation...Forced by social circumstances to praise novels they haven't
read, writers always say they are 'wonderfully evocative'...Writers who
are most elegant on the subject of the death of the novel are always
writers who were once mildly popular and now no longer read."
If "Always" explores the truth of our collective media lies, "Almost
Famous," deals with our cultural mania for celebrity-dom. In one such
section, Shields recounts the lengthy yet utterly forgettable career of
Bob Balaban (Midnight Cowboy, Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
remarking that: "Like someone dead or very famous, Balaban is trapped in
an absolutely unchangeable identity. In almost all of these movies he is
extremely dislikable in precisely the same way: humorously over concerned
with procedure, passive-aggressive to the point of self-parody, dogged,
eunuchized, bloodless...Balaban almost always plays Jews: he's a scapegoat
Christ suffering for our one irredeemable sin-we are not movie stars,
either."
In Shields' own family, this desire for "greatness" takes the form of
his father's life-long claim of being related to Joseph Shildkraut, the
academy award winning actor who played Alfred Dreyfuss in The Life of
Emile Zola. After meticulously recounting every story his father has ever
told regarding his family's tenuous dealings with the Shildkrauts, Shields
closes the section by asking: "Why do I care about being related to
someone who-on the basis of my father's stories and The Diary of Ann
Frank-appears to be a singularly unpleasant human being and painfully
ham-fisted actor? Because as Sting says, 'In America, everybody is in show
business...Everybody aspires to be famous.' Maybe I'm also related to
Brooke Shields; towards the end of Endless Love, when she's crying in that
dark New York hotel room, trying to say goodbye to David, and her hair is
braided and rolled up in a bun, she does, it seems to me, especially in
the mouth-and-chin area, look at least a little like the way I sometimes
looked as a teenager."
Yet for all this sassy exploring of cultural myths, Remote
maintains the intimacy of confession. Indeed, the artistic and moral
core of the book is revealed in "Confessions," the sections Shields
devotes to his kindred spirit Jean-Jacques Rousseau. "The origin of
language is ambiguity of feeling," Shields writes. "Rousseau's commitment
to language signifies his devotion to resolving certain ambiguities in his
emotional life, but his decision to rely upon language to discover meaning
only drives the paradoxes deeper." This idea-becoming "Remote"
through precisely that activity conceived as key to understanding and
connection-echoes throughout the book. One of the most personal examples
of this comes in "Stuttering":
"In elementary school I started stuttering and so I kept a
record-dozens of yellow, legal-sized pages-of Robin's 'Holy' outburst, his
alliteration and assonance, his fast riffs in sharp contrast to the
laconic Batman. Holy Homicide, Batman. Holy Hurricane, Batman. Holy
Whatever, Batman. One day, oddly (characteristically, self-destructively),
I sent my one and only copy of Robin's exclamations to the producers of
Batman; I thought it would connect me in powerful, mysterious and
irrevocable ways to the show I spent all week thinking about. I got back a
letter thanking me for my interest, and an autographed photograph of the
laconic Batman. I never watched or wanted to watch the show again. I
stuttered much worse than usual for a few days, then returned to my usual
rate of disfluency."
Language as a diversion from communication rather than a means to it
is not a new theme in Shields' work; neither are experiments in form. His
second novel, Dead Languages , portrays a life-long stutterer who lives
with his domineering mother and manic-depressive father, unable to make
them understand his secret dreams and fears. His third book, A Handbook
for Drowning, tells the story of a young man struggling to come to terms
with his family neuroses through a series of connected but
non-chronologically linked stories. What's new about Remote is
that Shields takes the form of autobiography-the making public of what is
essentially private-and inverts it, brilliantly exposing the effects
mass-market media have on all our relationships. If nothing else, then,
Remote demonstrates that looking inward and looking outward are
simultaneous processes in the postmodern age.
Yet by exploring how the most intimate aspects of people's lives get
rendered for public consumption in a media culture, and how much his own
childhood was devoted to consuming these images, a deeper issue emerges
in Shields' work : the way desire in our society has been transformed from
a search for personal connection to voyeurism. Thus Remote
ultimately does describe the psychodynamics of the American nuclear
family-"Remoteness is precisely what coming-of-age and falling in
love are about. It is one of this book's many ironies that it is only in
denying this as a goal that Shields is able to reveal the truth of it on
the most personal level.
"Confess things to the camera. I don't know. Say things that you're
most ashamed of, things that you don't want to remember, things that you
don't want anybody to know. Maybe that way there'll be some truth," reads
the epigraph to Remote (attributed to Jim McBride); Shields lives
up to the advice, offering a bold, candid, and haunting book about the
pain and ecstasy of growing up in a celebrity culture.
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