Everything We Wanted to Know About David Shields (and Already Asked)

THE VERY LAST INTERVIEW
By David Shields

Is it poor kind to start out a assessment of a e-book with a query? Not if the e-book is David Shields’s “The Very Final Interview,” an amusing compilation of a whole bunch of brief, random-seeming questions that come unaccompanied by solutions. From the primary web page (“Able to roll?”) to the final (“What do you positively not wish to write?”), Shields maintains a playful and absurdist tone that pokes enjoyable on the typical Q. and A., a staple of journalism that offers means right here to the Q. minus the A.

The e-book lacks an introduction, and the one clue to the writer’s intentions is offered on the again cowl in a short writer’s description. We study that Shields, who has apparently given many interviews in the midst of his 40-year writing profession, determined to systematically collect the questions posed to him after which pare them down. Initially he collected 2,700, which I suppose is a few form of achievement, even when the one comparability could be these notorious SAT guides bulging with a thousand-plus observe questions.

Shields, a loyal postmodernist and blend grasp, appears desperate to create new literary genres, or a minimum of to sabotage the outdated ones. His controversial 2010 e-book, “Actuality Starvation: A Manifesto,” was assembled largely from materials swiped from different authors. Shields appeared to be saying that recycling is a essential inventive gesture, one which he discovered thrillingly genuine beside the deliberate deceptions of fiction.

In his newest effort, Shields’s goal is a better one: the media interview. In 1969, when Andy Warhol based his journal, Interview, he helped inaugurate a tradition wherein the traditional exercise of posing questions — the idea of the Talmudic method to buying information, in addition to the much-vaunted Socratic methodology — was decreased to a nosy inquiry into the personal lifetime of celebrities. Which isn’t to denigrate the type of the interview, a impartial entity that may be infused with any diploma of triviality or profundity. A supply of impressed leisure (hi there, Johnny Carson), interviews have additionally been a automobile for important truth-telling, as within the oral-history books of the Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich.

The questions in Shields’s e-book have their very own distinct character. Granted, a few of them are nominally informational, equivalent to “What number of brokers have you ever had?” or “Are you aware what ‘JSTOR’ stands for?” However many others bristle with an aggressive humor. “Might you please identify 11 distinguished, up to date writers whose work you vehemently dislike?” “Do you fervently want for a MacArthur fellowship as a validation of your existence?”

The prickly tone at instances escalates into bullying. “Is yours a failed life?” “Has your whole life been a little bit of a nonstarter?” Or, “In case your books aren’t actually promoting anymore — which roughly implies that you don’t have a readership — then why, precisely, are you continue to writing them?”

At first it appears as if Shields intends his e-book to be an indictment of the media. Though he doesn’t cite any journalists by identify, lots of his questions evoke the bleatings of a sure kind of passive-aggressive interviewer, alternately obsequious and reducing, who envies the accomplishments of his well-known topics but craves their firm to finish his loneliness.

However what if Shields made up the questions he supposedly culled from previous interviews? As you learn on, you develop into extra satisfied of that risk. (The writer’s description on the jacket acknowledges that the questions underwent “rewriting and enhancing and remixing” within the curiosity of “discovering a through-line.”) Does that flip his e-book into a distinct life kind? A piece of fiction? A memoir? An imitation of Padgett Powell’s question-based novel, “The Interrogative Temper”?

Shields desires to blur inventive boundaries, a noble postmodernist pursuit, however “The Very Final Interview” succeeds solely in blurring his level. Regardless of the broad cultural exploration promised within the jacket copy, Shields has produced a slender, nihilistic investigation into the vicissitudes of his personal profession. Preoccupied by his skilled disappointments, he’s inattentive to the elegant consolations of artwork. I’ve a query for him. Subsequent time, are you able to please assume larger?