Also this issue:

Fringe, Interrupted
A Fringe hoax causes a stir at this year's festival.
-Debra Auspitz

That's a Wrap
A mini-guide to Fringe';s last weekend.

The World Famous Pontani Sisters
-Juliet Fletcher

Cats
-Debra Auspitz

Why I Live at the P.O.
-Lori Hill

David Zippel
-Steve Cohen

How They Got In
A surprisingly rosy view of the college admissions process.
-Justin Bauer

September 12-18, 2002

book quicks

by M.J. Fine

Enough About You: Adventures in Autobiography

By David Shields, Simon & Schuster, 174 pp., $22

David Shields set out to write an autobiography that’s at once coolly detached and singularly self-absorbed: “I want to get past myself … but the only way I know how to do this is to ride along on my own nerve endings; the only way out is deeper in.” It’s a good premise, but there’s one problem: A compelling biography takes as its subject someone so interesting that others will want to read it. Enough About You presents only David Shields -- son, stutterer, writer, lover, basketball fan.

He subscribes to the belief that the more specific he is, the more universal his story becomes. (Except, apparently, when it comes to his love life. He admits in the acknowledgements that the women in Enough About You are composite characters.) He doesn't tell his story in a straightforward manner; he uses his experiences to illustrate a point, but just as often he writes as a reporter, intimate with the issues but out of the picture.

He explores others' maxims, tries them on for size, discards them when they don't fit. A five-page chapter devoted to criticism cites, in varying degrees of agreement, Adorno, Amis, Cocteau, Dana, Goethe, Keats, Nabokov, Plath, and a passel of Shields' own reviewers. Later, he rhapsodizes about Bill Murray's balance before marching in the opposite direction. He shares his ambivalence toward Judaism through a close reading of Adam Sandler's "The Chanukah Song," and he couches his take on morality in a chapter that's mind-numbing for those who are less than enthralled by basketball.

Shields' beloved specificity has its limits. Enough About You stands where the author's interests intersect with the reader's; its devices create distance as well as common ground. A consummate man's man, Shields has succeeded in writing about mankind. It's a story that resonates with other men, perhaps, but one that only his father could love.