A tip of the hat to Levi Asher’s Literary Kicks for calling attention to Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, reviewed in the NYT Book Review yesterday. I missed it. Asher notes that David Shields’ book “urges us to reject the notion that fiction is artistically or philosophically superior to nonfiction.”
Amen to that. And I want to learn more. But decades of pronouncements that the novel is dead and glorification of New Journalism make triumphing over the novel now a little like artists who declare that their work helps ensure the Holocaust will never happen again. (I’m sure the Israeli Air Force will be in touch as needed.)
I date my conversion to non-fiction to my 1985 discovery of A.J. Liebling’s collection of boxing essays, The Sweet Science.
A lot of novels shouldn’t get into the ring against that book.
Since then there’s been a lot more, including memoir, biography, and journalism by Mark Singer, Calvin Trillin, Lawrence Weschler, Geoffrey Wolff, Nicholas Dawidoff, Richard Feynman, Sidney Zion, Ben Hecht, Meyer Berger.
And, of course, Seymour Krim.
(If you don’t see a common thread, check out the name of this blog.)
Krim picked up on the hunger Shields highlights as early as 1960, when in “What’s This Cat’s Story?” Krim wrote that “people are hungry and desperate for straightforward communication about the life we are all leading in common.” In that essay Krim ranted against literary criticism and hyper-intellectualism, but he applied the same idea to the novel a decade later in “The American Novel Made Me.”
Which hardly means that there is nothing new for Shields to say. But it does mean Shields should buy a copy of my new Krim collection.
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