Enough About You; A Memoir of No One in Particular

Unlike Tom Cruise, many of us are unsure, in these troubling, turbulent times, whether we now need pay so much, or rather any, attention to the arts and literature. Furthermore, one imagines that if David Shields' new book, Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography (Simon & Schuster, 174 pages, $22) came his way, even Tom Cruise would stop smiling.

"Both of my parents were journalists. For many years my mother was the West Coast correspondent for The Nation," the (very) slim volume begins. And what of Shields' papa? "The true poem, my father likes to say, quoting Walt Whitman, is the daily paper. When I was growing up, The New York Times was airmailed to our house every day. Mornings, I would frequently find on the kitchen counter an article neatly scissored out of the Times for me to read as a model of journalistic something or other. (Actually, I may have made this detail up, but it sounds right, it feels right, maybe it happened once; I'm going to leave it in.)"

It is here, on page four, that one becomes absolutely giddy, hoping this is in fact what one has been waiting for so anxiously?a really clever satire of the memoir illness currently plaguing the publishing community, which will no doubt be viewed historically as the literary equivalent of disco. The dust jacket copy relays Shields' wish to "make one's life into a work of art," along with the promise that Enough About You reveals not only deep truths about David Shields, but "deep truths about ourselves as well." "The only real journey is deeper inside and the only serious subject is the mystery of identity?mine, especially, but yours, too, I promise," Shields explains. "Here, in other words, is how I give you me. Here also, is how I give you you. Here, finally, is how you give me me."

We willingly abandon our National Enquirer to the bathroom floor, and make sure there's plenty of paper, until: "I remember hearing my highly alliterative short story?'The Gorgeous Green of the Hedges'?gently demolished in my first workshop and, upon returning to my apartment, eating bowl after bowl of mint-chip ice cream until the room spun." Er?

Dear Dad,

After our phone conversation last night?in which you said apropos of Dead Languages and the "uncomfortably close" resemblance between yourself and the character of Teddy, that your pride in my accomplishment was at least matched by your anger and shame at seeing your foibles publicly paraded?I thought I would sit down and try to write to you some of my thoughts and feelings about the relationship between real life and fiction.

And then publish them! Suddenly Shields' potshots at Wolfe, Steinbeck and Bellow (all of whom he refers to as "real writers" in sarcastic quotes) aren't settling as easily as they went down. A quick return to the dust jacket reveals that Shields is responsible for two previous novels and several works of nonfiction (for which he has won numerous awards and, like that bizarre spectacle justified to us only as "modern dance," is living off Christ knows how many government grants).

Still, even as the hairs on the back of one's neck stand straight on end, one hesitates. Yet one knows very well that one must look. Glancing up, one takes in the author photo and interprets the relevant iconography there: an effete-looking Shields dressed in all black, with goatee and wire-rimmed glasses, pointing a vintage camera at us. And yes, sweet Mary mother of Christ yes, the author picture is credited to...David Shields.

"I mean the portrait of Teddy (of 'you'), as a sympathetic one..." Shields goes on to tell his audience (which, at this point, must consist entirely of his students at the University of Washington and his father?a man no doubt involved in a desperate bid to buy up every copy as we speak). If one feels it merits the price of a dialup, one can visit something called davidshields.com, where one will learn, among other genuinely flummoxing details, that Shields has been working on Enough About You for three years. (What was the most challenging aspect of his research? Finding a Starbucks that made the foam head on his latte just right?) Also Shields' admission that he belongs to "a whole group of writers around the country who share a loose aesthetic about a very new way of storytelling." (We want names and addresses! Prepare the torches and the hounds!) And that Mr. Shields' book asks, consecutively, "What does it mean to construct a self? What does it mean to turn your life into a narrative? What's gained, what's lost? What lies inevitably get told? What deeper truths are reached or at least reached for? My book has no answers to these questions," he elaborates, "but it frames and asks these questions in what I hope is an honest and provocative way." (While a monkey with an erection sits on your shoulder? What the fuck are you on about, man!)

Enough About You?besides giving us chapter titles (average length four pages) like "Possible Postcards from Rachael, Abroad," or "Games and Words and Ice" (wherein we find the author too lazy to put quotes around the dialogue?although, wait, maybe he's playing with genre again), essays on pop culture figures such as Bill Murray that are best suited to a backwoods conference presided over by professors in Beavis and Butt-head t-shirts and, uncharacteristically, the happy aside that Hunter S. Thompson once replied to a fan letter Shields sent by dubbing the author a "pencil-necked geek"?has definitely achieved something new and different with "the memoir." It's stripped it of any wit or meaning.

To be fair, there are a few intentionally funny moments in Enough About You, like the time Shields scratched "I shall dethrone Shakespeare" in a wall of the library at Brown (groan). But these rare victories are significantly overshadowed by the feeling one would have liked Shields much better back then. In the last chapter, which opens, unbelievably, with "Bobby Knight, c'est moi," Shields lists Knight's many violations against human decency and the most basic notions of civilization. There's the time Knight hit a Puerto Rican policeman before practice at the Pan American Games, the afternoon he stuffed a fan from an opposing team in a garbage can, the interview in which he told Connie Chung, "I think that if rape is inevitable, relax and enjoy it," etc. Soon the reader, no matter how much you loathe the basketball legend, is wishing they were reading Knight's autobiography instead.

You, sir, are no Bobby Knight. Writers' lives should be written by other writers, when they're dead. Simon & Schuster should sue.

?

Enter Daniel Harris' A Memoir of No One in Particular: In Which Our Author Indulges in Naive Indiscretions, a Self-Aggrandizing Solipsism and an Off-Putting Infatuation with His Own Bodily Functions (Basic Books, 239 pages, $23), a book that is an exact parody of Shields', came out two weeks prior and is 65 pages longer. The trees should sue!

"I wanted to examine my behavior impersonally, to write the memoir of a nameless individual?the autobiography of both no one in particular and everyone in general," Harris claims. Chapter titles include "Moving and Making Faces," "Speaking/Listening" and "Farting, Pooping, Peeing, and Bathing." Harris also takes an "unsparingly objective stance" when analyzing himself, uses plenty of foreign phrases and even has a "Dear Lynn" letter, reproduced from his youth, where "beneath the chaos of this dyslexic note" one can make out the "seeds" of the writer's "prose style."

Harris' prose style is distinctly Victorian, and (like Shields' book) the whole thing has an immediately delightful, gay-man-in-silk-Chinese-robe attitude. One flips to the back cover to find a Picasso-esque black-and-white drawing of Harris?a mass of hair accompanied by the large, cycloptic eye staring provocatively out of the mess, accompanied by a footnote at the bottom explaining the illustration is "courtesy of the author"?and sighs.

And that's the problem. One feels merely relieved to discover Harris' work is mostly satire, that the writer's tongue has not wandered too far from his cheek. The odd truth is that Shields has written a far better spoof of the memoir than Harris has. A Memoir of No One in Particular's jacket asks, "has the memoir overtaken the novel, becoming too influential in our contemporary literary scene? Are you annoyed that no one has done anything up to now to counter the craze?"

Yes, obviously, but can another memoir be the answer? If the current trend continues, soon writers will be no better than actors. Symbolism (something Shields frowns upon) will only exist so long as there's a nice chart on the first page exposing it. That way the writer doesn't have to work at doing it, and the reader doesn't have to work at figuring it out. One might indeed consider Steinbeck "humorless" and "sentimental," as Shields does, but a worthy adversary nonetheless. Steinbeck, as Walter Sobchak would say, was the man in the black pajamas. Shields (an admitted failed novelist?or rather an "ex-fiction" writer) is like a privileged, bored Saudi trying to find reverse on a Russian tank?"This is not a worthy fucking adversary, dude."

After reading the many questions these two books pose in their pages, it seems only one remains to be asked: Anybody know where one might purchase a decent "Omniscient Narrator or Bust" t-shirt?