Towards the end of his consistently enjoyable, occasionally convincing memoir How Literature Saved My Life (Notting Hill Editions, £12), David Shields, the one-time novelist and, more recently, “poster boy for the death of the novel” (his description), provides a list of 55 works “I swear by”. A number of fiction writers make the cut, though usually for their journals or criticism, or for writing novels with a low fiction content. Proust’s “commitment is never to the narrative”, he explains; it’s to the narrative “as a vector on the grid of his argument”. The “expository” first chapter of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse- Five “renders moot the rest of the book and everything else he ever wrote. I live and die for the overt meditation.”
The book best equipped to make Shields’s revolution look plausible and even desirable is Speedboat, the first of two brittle fictions by the journalist Renata Adler – who is at the top of his list alphabetically and also, perhaps, in terms of preference. Shields describes the book as an oblique Bildungsroman and an anthropological autobiography, proposing a little perversely that the name of Adler’s narrator, Jen Fein, “suggests that she’s not real, that she’s Renata Adler”, much as when, celebrating his “doppelgänger of the next generation”, Ben Lerner, he calls the narrator of Leaving the Atocha Station by the author’s name (“Ben won’t mind!”).
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