- David Shields: Look at this guy, just taking up space.
David Shields takes up too much goddamned space.
It's not that he's a bad writer, although he has written some very bad books (about which more soon). It's just that he's everywhere. Shields looms large over the University of Washington's MFA writing program as its Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence, and his back-flap biography is stuffed full of accomplishment. He's published 16 books, been translated into 20 languages, won the Guggenheim and two NEA fellowships. (And he shows no sign of stopping: The dust jacket for his newest book announces Shields has "five books coming out in the next year and a half.") His work has been published in every mainstream literary-minded journal this side of the New Yorker. He's well-regarded in the literary world, and his connections appear to be positively boundless. You seemingly can't attend a reading in Seattle without sitting next to someone who's attended one of Shields's classes; if you prod them into reminiscences, a handful will swoon over his genius, but more likely you'll hear a rant about his endless lectures, which by many accounts are packed with self-promotion, name-dropping, and smug proclamations.
Some of Shields's books are interesting enough, in a safe, academic sort of way. Black Planet is still probably the best thing he's ever written. Reality Hunger, his self-described "manifesto" about a need for new narratives, the failure of modern fiction, and other riffs on the work of David Markson, is probably his most notorious work, but it's not like anything serious is at stake in it. Shields is not so much a bomb-thrower as a giggling pillow-tosser…
