Book beast
More Book beastHave We Given Up on Fiction?
by Tom Shone
Tom Shone was film critic of the London Sunday Times from 1994-1999. He is the author of two books, Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer (Free Press) and In The Rooms, his first novel, will be published in the fall by St Martin’s Press. He blogs at tomshone.blogspot.com.
MTV; Frazer Harrison / Getty Images
When memoirs outsell novels and reality TV is more watched than dramas, Tom Shone wonders if David Shields is right that we need to embrace a new reality-based entertainment.
America is losing faith with its fictions. Such is the thesis of David Shields, whose new book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto lays out a compelling case for the prosecution:
The quasi-home movie, Open Water. Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. Joe Frank’s radio show In The Dark. The depilation scene in The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Lynn Shelton’s unscripted film Humpday (“all the writing takes place in the editing room”)... public-access-TV, karaoke nights, VH1’s Behind-the-Music series, behind the scenes interviews running parallel to the “real” action on reality television shows, rap artists taking a slice of an existing song and blending an entirely new song on top of it, DVD of feature films that inevitably include a documentary about the ‘making of the movie’....”
You’d have to have been living on Mars not to recognize the broad truth underlying that list: everywhere you look, fiction is going into the ring with reality and getting trounced in three rounds. Reality TV shows beat fictional dramas in the ratings. Memoirs outsell novels. More people voted for American Idol than for Barack Obama. High school girls write letters to the “real” Juliet, while fans of the Matrix plug into that film’s DVD extras to unravel the magic. This new interrogatory mood may surprise those who cast Americans as a nation of dreamers, fantasists, escapologists seeking endless distraction from the pain of their daily lives in the doughy delights of the 24-hour pop-culture sensorium. It’s called the American Dream not the American Uncomfortable Fact.
I would still prefer to sit in judgment of the hopeful, beavering snouts on The Apprentice than sit down and talk finances with my wife.
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. By David Shields. 240 pages. Knopf. $24.95.
According to Shields pop culture has succeeded only too well: wired up the kazoo with high-speed internet connection, punching away at our blackberries and iphones, hooked into our twitter feeds and Facebook status updates, we have more ways than ever to not be paying attention to what is directly in front of our noses. Sequestered in our electronic eyries, we long for scraps of reality to puncture the fourth wall—SOS notes hurled through our flat screens. “Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any,” writes Shields. “We like non-fiction because we live in fictitious times.” Hence our taste for movies like Paranormal Activity which ape the jagged rhythms of documentary; and for TV shows that drop the air kisses of fictional drama for the Darwinian death-match that is the fashion industry (Project Runway), or LA hairdressing (Shear Genius). Shields is not the first to point out that there’s nothing real to these shows; “hybrid mutants of documentaries, games shows and soaps” they offer just as much of an escape as I Dream of Jeannie ever did. I would still prefer to sit in judgment of the hopeful, beavering snouts on The Apprentice than sit down and talk finances with my wife.
As for reality—the stuff happening outside the range of our Wi-Fi connections—well, nobody believes in it anymore. All those whale infanticides and melting ice caps and black presidents. No way. It’s too unreal. Too close to stuff of fiction. “The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality,” writes Shields. “The actuality is continually outdoing our talents and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of the novelist.” Well said, Sir.... except.... Hang on. That sounds a little familiar. Hmm. Turn to the back of the book, and sure enough, there in an appendix, we find that that quote actually belongs to Phillip Roth in his famous 1961 essay “Writing American Fiction” for Commentary. “Our culture is obsessed with real events because we experience hardly any”? That was Salon’s Andrew O’ Hehir. “We like non fiction because we live in fictitious times”? Michael Moore.
YOUR FRIENDS
Joy Behar Was Right
Jeff Shesol is the author of Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. The Supreme Court. He is also a founding partner of West Wing Writers, a speechwriting and strategy firm and the author of Mutual Contempt. From 1998 to 2001, Shesol served as a speechwriter to President Bill Clinton. A Rhodes Scholar, he holds degrees in history from Oxford and Brown universities. His comic strip, Thatch, appeared daily in more than 150 newspapers from 1994-1998.
Dragon Tattoo Star Narrowed to Final Four
Gina Piccalo spent a decade at the Los Angeles Times covering Hollywood. She's now a contributing writer for Los Angeles Magazine and her work has appeared in Elle, More and Emmy. She can be found at ginapiccalo.com.
A former editor of Men's Journal, Claire Martin has written for Outside, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times magazine.
Inside Chelsea's Wedding Party
Lynnley Browning is a frequent contributor to the business pages of The New York Times and is a former Moscow-based correspondent for Reuters, where she covered energy and commodities. She grew up in Tulsa, Okla., majored in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University, and is fluent in Russian. She lives in Hamden, Conn., with her son.
Nick Hornby's Oscar Insta-Buzz
Tom Shone was film critic of the London Sunday Times from 1994-1999. He is the author of two books, Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer (Free Press) and In The Rooms, his first novel, will be published in the fall by St Martin’s Press. He blogs at tomshone.blogspot.com.
Apartheid for Aliens
Tom Shone was film critic of the London Sunday Times from 1994-1999. He is the author of two books, Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer (Free Press) and In The Rooms, his first novel, will be published in the fall by St Martin’s Press. He blogs at tomshone.blogspot.com.
John Travolta and the New OCD Villains
Tom Shone was film critic of the London Sunday Times from 1994-1999. He is the author of two books, Blockbuster: How Hollywood Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Summer (Free Press) and In The Rooms, his first novel, will be published in the fall by St Martin’s Press. He blogs at tomshone.blogspot.com.
revgrant
Back to basics, that I haven't found referenced in any treatment of Shields' book. Imagination is a human quality to be embraced; story telling is as old as humanity; metaphor is at the heart of language. Shields instead comes across as a high functioning Aspergers person: obsessiveness, literalness.
SharnCedar
This is going to be way, way over your head. But let me try to explain the history of fiction.
Let's just go back 120 years. Before radio, and after the printing press, fiction was THE popular entertainment for the silly masses. That and newspapers, but lets just consider fiction. There is a golden age of fiction, let's say anything from 1890 to 1920 or so. I have tapped into a huge supply of these old novels, and have been reading them. They are dusty, yellowing, smell like dust and age, but each one is a little gem of mindless entertainment. This was THE entertainment of its time. So it is of course vapid, shallow, and pleasing. It is like today's TV. Just nice little stories - character sketches or mysteries or stories of social interactions of the upper classes. That is the purpose of fiction, that is the truth of fiction.
So what happens after radio becomes popular? Fiction changes. The books change, completely change. The stories change - everything becomes "darker" , more "intellectual" , more "experimental" - in other words boring and self-indulgent. Why is that? Because the market was gone. There was no market for fiction, the world of light entertainment had passed it by. Fiction went from a vital, necessary commodity, the Queen of entertainment loved and needed by all educated people, to an anachronism, an art.
When the camera made portraits obsolete, painters became boring and self-indulgent "artists". When the gun came along, the bow and arrow became an indulgent pastime of the rich. Once a horse was the most commonplace and uninteresting of things; since the motor car, horses are now supposedly high-class animals that give thrills to young rich girls. Rich girls wouldn't be caught dead riding a horse, outside of the carriage, 100 years ago. They wouldn't be caught dead pressing themselves against a smelly animal. And no one, not anyone, not even a university professor, would be interested in reading the fiction written today. They had real fiction. It was a vital part of the everyday world. It was the only message from anywhere on a dark, gaslit night.
Sempronia
How much of this is really non-fiction, though? There have been a ton of internet sources discussing the ways in which American Idol is fixed a certain way by executives to create a narrative. It's the same, to some extent, with other reality shows. I myself am a devotee of Project Runway, and was sorely disappointed last season at how openly the strings were being pulled. Reality television is and will be an exercise in non-scripted narrative moulding, just as memoir will always be an exercise in self-fashioning and self-presentation... and politics? It's all one big, ugly generic collision.
I would love to say something constructive, but it's all just depressing. Hire back the writers, dammit!
johnstafford
I'll leave the analysis of the popularity of fiction vs. non-fiction books to experts in the publishing world. Although, I bet if you went beyond The New York Times best-seller list and counted romance novels, graphic novels, books written for the teen audience, and the separate world of novels published in languages other than English, "fiction" would still lead in sales by a wide margin.
=As for TV, it's not so much the rise of "reality" shows versus "fictional" programming that interests me, but whether there's a dichotomy between the audiences for these genres.
Specifically, broadcast television, obviously attracted to the lower costs involved, is binging on reality fare, while cable stations (e.g., TNT, A&E, FX) seem to be providing a renaissance for scripted drama.
=I wonder if this divide is reflected in the make-up of viewers for the different styles? Would it be condescending to assume that "reality" shows have dumbed-down the audiences for network programming?
jeremyfreese
"More people voted for American Idol than for Barack Obama."
Um, no.
TheLulaBlanket
Right. If that's true, than it's only because eight-year-old girls voted 1,000 times for American Idol by texting from their parents' phone.
DeaconDrJones
I'll stick with the fiction, thanks. At least fiction doesn't pretend to be "real-life" like so-called reality television. Give me Lost, BSG, and South Park. Lord of the Rings, Big Lebowski, and Coraline. In fact, the more that I think about it, dumber this article, and Mr. Clevers history lesson above, sound.
saturdaynght88
The thing is all this "reality" TV is based on the false assumption that it's real. People change in front of the cameras on these shows to make themselves seem more dramatic. The editors will put clips together out of sync to give false story lines. I don't think we'll ever stray away from fiction as long as the quality of 'reality' entertainment is so terribly poor. I would rather read a good novel any day than listen to 20 somethings with trust funds in southern California talk about their favorite type of mineral water
Pandora1
I'm not too sure about Shone's issue of "Reality vs. Fiction," but I'm certain that the reality of HIS writing is that is that it lacks even a modicum of good grammar and spelling, and the thoughts themselves get lost in a hodge-podge of frantic, over-blown verbiage. To wit: on page 2 alone, he gives us "Shields of (is) guilty of more originality than...."; "Frey was not Oprah's betrayer (,) he was her creature; and of course, "others(') pithy little apercis:--" (?), it would appear the "oxyacetelane" torch(oxyacetylene) of which he speaks should be applied directly across the whole of his essay. The essay itself is simply unreadable, and beyond the pale of the usual puffed-up British posturing we dumb Americans have 'had up with to put.' (Thanks, Keith Olbermann)
JeffreyinLA
Plenty of people I know have turned away from televisions in utter embarrassment (and complete disinterest) over what passes for TV entertainment today. When I hear my co-workers talking excitedly about this reality show or that reality show, I can't help thinking less of them.
Large chunks of demographic segments -- people with money, by the way -- are shunned by producers and advertisers who chase only the youngest viewers. Good luck with that fickle strategy. And ask the Jonas Brothers how their careers are working out now that most of their fans have hit puberty.
sebastianAugustus
One always hears that fiction is dying ("the novel is dying," "Is the short story dead?" "Blah Blah").
But if fiction is dying, why are vampires so hot? Wait. Are they real? No, they're fictional.
If the novel is dead, why does Dan Brown sell a gazillion copies?
Didn't someone named Harry Potter come along, once upon a time, and interest a couple readers?
There will always be fantasy, science fiction, horror -- there will always be a medium called fiction.
One hundred years ago the book business/audience was actually pretty small. More influential. But it's always been a small world. Nothing killed it off.
This little world of fiction lovers will persist as long as people exist.
It's just not an "either/or" thing if TV viewers happen to like things like Idol or Apprentice, or some readers gobble up James Frey's "non-fiction." The same sort of people also like Family Guy, The Simpsons, etc.etc. (fiction). Some people also read Tolstoy. Some people always will.
But not everybody.
Thank you.
As a first time user, your comment has been submitted for review. It can take anywhere from a few hours to a day or two for your comment to be reviewed, depending on the time of week and the volume of comments we receive.