The Very Last Interview

January 10, 2022
Writer Shields (Reality Hunger) rounds up questions he’s been asked over four decades in this meandering collection of queries that go unanswered. Some are standard interview fodder about the process of writing: “Do you write every day? Do you have a ‘schedule?’ ” Some are hilarious attempts to fashion a literate take on pop culture—“Do you now wish you had gotten a PhD so you could be discussing Roland Barthes on Racine rather than Bart Simpson on his kegger?” or “But what is the role of the imagination in this ‘post-literature literature’ that you envision?” Some of the questions zero in on Shields’s childhood (“Did Joan Baez really sing at your sixteenth birthday party?”; “Who was little Davy Shields?”), while others meander over philosophical topics (“Why is the human animal so sad?”; “Why are we so melancholy”). There are requisite questions about the relationship between writers and critics, and the usual riffs on a writer’s reading habits. It’s full of rambling ruminations and surrealistic fluff, but the onslaught of questions does offer insight into the art of interviewing—in some instances, the interviewer is obviously more interested in their own perspective, while in others it’s clear the questioner has thought deeply about their subject. This falls squarely between the absurd and the clever.

January 1, 2022
Iconoclast Shields has a reputation for disrupting established structures of literature, bending form, and questioning assumptions in search of authenticity so as to better reflect reality. His latest is a collection of interview questions that Shields has fielded over the years, gathered into 22 sections, including "Process," "Childhood," "Reading," "Truth," "Art," "Failure," and "Criticism." The breadth of these queries speaks to the wide range of human activity, thought, and introspection on which Shields is expected to have particular insight. More often than not, the questions provide deeper insights into the interviewers' pretensions, apparent vanity, and desire to impress. Their often-feeble attempts at humor are frequently cringeworthy, and their woeful attempts at cleverness betray a glaring lack thereof. The collective inanity, banality, and redundancy of the interviewers' questions serve to make Shields' point. By cleverly juxtaposing the questions and reframing the context, Shields exposes the artificiality inherent in literary discourse, resulting in a though-provoking, hilarious, genre-defying work. Like the game show Jeopardy, the questions are the answers. For readers of David Markson and George Perec.

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Starred review from December 15, 2021
A montage of all the questions the author has been asked in the last 40 years. Like Reality Hunger--his mashup of numbered paragraphs, mostly unattributed and lacking contextual background, pulled largely from other sources--this book is a delightful and utterly Shields-ian work. According to the jacket description, the author gathered every interview he's ever given and transcribed every question asked, ignoring his own answers. His collage of these questions creates an absolutely hilarious takedown of the interview process, of his own public persona, and of the journalists themselves, blessedly anonymous, who asked some of the most outrageously mean, out-there, self-important, stupid, and simply impossible questions imaginable--and then doubled down with prodding follow-ups. Organized into brief chapters ("Childhood," "Envy," "Jewishness, "Suicide," etc.), this theater of the absurd derives its humor from questions like these: "Can you define 'truth'--preferably in one good long paragraph?" "You have only one child--is there a cruelty involved in such a decision?" "Are you competitive at all with your daughter (whose graphic memoir I've read and like at least as much as anything you've done of late)?" "Seriously then: How do you get through the day if you 'know' life is utterly bereft of purpose?" "Do you still think that, very briefly, in the early-to-mid-1980s, David Letterman was actually quite interesting?" "Do you feel like a tertiary character in a Henry James novella?" "Is the overexamined life worth living?" (Follow-up: "By which I guess I mean, you've analyzed your life to death, but will you have lived your life at all prior to your death?") "So--not to put too fine a point on it--has it been an utterly wasted life?" "Were you disappointed that some of the critics didn't pick up on the humor?" Not this time. Revenge is a dish best served with helpless laughter. Totally deadpan and irresistibly hilarious.

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