There is also -- nod to "Hamlet" -- a father ghosting through the narrative, against whom our essayist has quite an ax to grind. (The prologue actually begins: "Let the wrestling match begin: my stories versus his stories.") His father, if you buy Shields' take, is a man of singular feats: He survived an electrocution after stepping on the third rail of a train track as a child; remains priapic well into his 90s; finished a tennis match (and won) while suffering a heart attack. He's bigger than life -- especially, it seems, the author's life. Shield is at pains to describe his work (always a bad sign) as "an autobiography of my body, a biography of my father's body; an anatomy of our bodies together -- especially my dad's, his body, his relentless body." But this is no autobiography. It is a hiss of asides boiling over into an unattended rage:
Fatal attraction
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead; David Shields; Alfred A. Knopf: 232 pp., $23.95
"Was my father ever not as skinny as a (third) rail? . . . Has a day ever gone by in which he didn't exercise a couple of times? On long family car trips, did he ever not get out every few hours and execute 100 jumping jacks, to the admiration/puzzlement of other drivers on the highway?"
Toward the tail end of this onslaught, the reader wants nothing so much as to scream: He was probably trying to get a break from you!
No one could argue that Shields' prose is not smooth and appealing, and very occasionally, the essays have a taut lyricism. "Boys vs. Girls (i)," for example, concludes with what is essentially a prose poem, a gloss on the sexes told through a story of how both Shields and his girlfriend, in childhood, used to race. It ends with the bleak: "She ran away from me. A few years later she started smoking cigarettes, lost her wind, and became a cheerleader." It's quite moving. However, far more often, we get yearbook-ready insights like: "Life, in my view, is simple, tragic, and eerily beautiful," or "We're just animals walking around this earth for a brief time, our bodies housed in a mortal cage." But stripped of all context, brought to bear for an argument against no one and a story that has yet to be told, the mounting sentences can seem, as in one of Shields' technical asides, like cells dividing into rough new parts -- skin, teeth, glands -- toward an unknown being. The problem is, just like our bodies, we like our books to arrive fully formed.
