Jay's review
recommended for:
your father
status:
Read in February, 2008
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead by David Shields is a brilliant book of nonfiction prose. Go no further. Add to cart. Check out. Not convinced? Ok, how about this? David Shields meditates on the body’s ungraceful trek to death by considering his young daughter’s athleticism, his own waning physicality at middle age, and his father’s insatiable virility. Did I mention his father is 97? As in his other books of nonfiction (e.g., Remote & Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography) Shields mixes myriad modes of prose: reportage (w/ extensive research); anecdote & memoir; prose poetry (e.g. in recurring descriptions of night dreams, the prose shimmers); list-making (includes thoughtful, often contradictory quotes about sex & death from other writers & thinkers, past & present); literature, cultural, and film criticism. The writing goes where it wants to go. Example: early on Shields recalls poignant instances of youthful physical strength ...more
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead by David Shields is a brilliant book of nonfiction prose. Go no further. Add to cart. Check out. Not convinced? Ok, how about this? David Shields meditates on the body’s ungraceful trek to death by considering his young daughter’s athleticism, his own waning physicality at middle age, and his father’s insatiable virility. Did I mention his father is 97? As in his other books of nonfiction (e.g., Remote & Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography) Shields mixes myriad modes of prose: reportage (w/ extensive research); anecdote & memoir; prose poetry (e.g. in recurring descriptions of night dreams, the prose shimmers); list-making (includes thoughtful, often contradictory quotes about sex & death from other writers & thinkers, past & present); literature, cultural, and film criticism. The writing goes where it wants to go. Example: early on Shields recalls poignant instances of youthful physical strength giving way to fear of pain; the next paragraph: “In the Bhagavad Gita, the human body is defined as a wound with nine openings.” The paragraph following describes a newborn baby’s slow, even ugly development. The effect of this collaging is to feel Shields’ fixation on the body, its imperfections (a whole chapter on acne!), its beauty, its grotesque endurance. (Add to cart. Check out.) I love how Shields’ prose pushes so effortlessly into insight: “I used to want to urge him [his father:] out of this macho pose until I realized that it’s a way to cheer himself up, to avoid telling mild good-bye and good-night stories, to convince himself and us he’s still a tough guy from Brooklyn not yet ready to die.” The prose readily admits confusion & complicity and speaks the unspeakable often (see end of chapter titled “Rattlesnake Lake”!). Most notably Shields tells the story of his complex relationship with his father, with his father’s imperfect body as it relates to his own imperfect body. A reporter of his father’s life, Shields is in awe of his father one moment, envious another, disgusted the next. I know they have your credit card on file! Add to cart. Check out. In the end we see the writer’s deep, complex admiration for his father: “He showed me how to love the words that emerged from my mouth and from my typewriter, how to love being in my own body, how to love being in my own skin and not some other skin.” (Add to cart. Check out) This amazing book gives me another reason to be happy about being a father to my dear son. ...less
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead 
