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With this wonderfully wise, stunningly genuine, and painfully funny reserve, acclaimed copy writer David Shields uses himself as a representative for all visitors and freelance writers who seek to find salvation in literature. Mixing confessional criticism and anthropological autobiography, Shields explores the energy of literature (from Blaise Pascal's Penses to Maggie Nelson's Bluets, Renata Adler's Speedboat to Proust's A Remembrance of Things Past) to make life survivable, maybe even endurable. Shields evokes his deeply divided personality (his "ridiculous" ambivalence), his identity defects, his woes, his serious despairs. Books are his life, but when they come to feel unlifelike and archaic, he revels in a new kind of fine art that is situated closely on quotation and awareness and self-consciousness - perfect, since so a lot of what ails him is serious self-consciousness. And he stocks with us a final irony: he needs "literature to assuage individual loneliness, but nothing can assuage individual loneliness. Literature doesn't lie concerning this - which is what makes it essential.
