The Very Last Interview

Reviews

“I love David Shields’s new book, which I read in one sitting. There is so much to think about—not just what’s being said but the whole structure and conceit of the book. What is it—an interview? A memoir? A personal investigation? A meditation? Portrait of the artist as no longer a young man? The conversation is so beautifully presented: only one character speaks during the entire book, and yet it isn’t a monologue. Very deftly, Shields makes the reader feel that the interviewee is answering every question or offering all kinds of information and clarification.”

“An autobiography in question form, with the reader working to supply the answers based on the questions that follow. Brilliant.”

“Shields has done something seriously stunning here. Beautifully, compactly hysterical. What for me is so powerful, amid the irony and comic bite and radiant constraint and brainy brightness in every sentence, are the questions behind every question: How did all this oldness grow inside us when we thought we were paying attention? How many miles do we still have to go on this gas tank? Remind me again: Why have I spent a lifetime doing what I’m doing? I love this book, which brilliantly breaks the reader’s heart.”

“A sort of existential mixtape, and at the heart of it all is how others see us, what they imagine of us. ‘Do you think anyone can understand anyone else, and if not, what are any of us doing other than walking around trapped for in eternity in our own space suits?’ The Very Last Interview attempts to answer this question and at the same time complicates it in an utterly thrilling way. I love this book.”

“David Shields, the wild card in contemporary nonfiction, always challenges the presumptions of genre. His terrific new book, The Very Last Interview, is alternately hilarious, sad, and for any author, excruciatingly recognizable. By submitting to a self-inquisition, Shields demonstrates how much of our self-image is determined or undermined by the outside world, how much the voice of that doppelgänger feeds our doubt and inevitable sense of failure. Ironically, the book itself is a triumph, of honesty and craft.”

“Not for the first time when confronted with a book by David Shields, I approached with skepticism, was initially irritated, then charmed, and ended up being thoroughly captivated.”

“Engaging, lively, funny, and fascinating, partly for the way the questions answer themselves and partly for the gaps we have to imagine when the questions are answered in a way that we can’t hear. Shields’s preoccupations are very much in evidence, but I saw a lot of myself in it, as will, I would think, most readers. Quite wonderful.”

“Incredibly enjoyable to read, but not just a fun ride. The bullet-like ideas hide more complicated ideas, like string theory behind the Tilt-a-Whirl.”

“If these really are the questions, all the questions, put to a writer as literary-interview questions, this book is indeed remarkable. Put aside the deft orchestrating of the questions by the author. The thing to behold here is the dummkopfing the dummkopf questions effect—dummkopf questions, through no fault of the questioner, that render the writer a reciprocal dummkopf. The portrait of the writer that results, sitting there in his ineffable stupidity, unable to speak, is marvelous.”

“As with so many of David Shields’s books, when I read The Very Last Interview, I was in a state of incredulity. First, no way someone actually does this, does he? And second, there’s no way this is real, is it?…It’s maniacal and hilarious, and I’m impressed and in awe and also a little dubious. And even if I’m infuriated on Shields’s behalf, I’m in admiration of the ingenious trolling here. I can’t help but love the induced state that this book—as does Shields’s work in general—puts me in with the superimposition of belief and disbelief. I absolutely loved it.”

“A delightful and utterly Shieldsian work…[The Very Last Interview is] a 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…Totally deadpan and irresistibly hilarious.”

“David Shields has made a life out of being the leadoff hitter for American literature in the twenty-first century…Year after year he has produced the most outlandish book, one after another for the last twenty-five years or so, demonstrating the depth of his commitment to innovation, to cultural integrity, to honesty of outlook, to seeing us as we are, and to seeing fiction/nonfiction and literature as the perfect cultural analogues, the perfect embodiment of his (and our) time and place. And now he’s done it again with The Very Last Interview, a literal distillation of questions he’s faced, and we’ve all faced in one form or another at one time or another, gathered together in this wonderful essay/song cycle/movie reel/spaceshot.”

“Shields is one of the most interesting writers anywhere. He refuses to stop pushing boundaries. I scribble notes inside the covers of books that engage my brain; I scribble more notes in Shields’s books than anyone else’s. He is hilariously courageous because his courage is the ruthless kind, not the noble strain. His courage is a muscle that he’s developed and exercises as a matter of habit. He never loses his cognitive insolence.”

“Who would have thought that dozens upon dozens of questions, all addressed to the same author, could be so hilarious? Or that the space between those questions could feel so alive with a tantalizing and ambiguous energy? What did the man answer? Shields is extraordinarily resourceful in finding new ways to explore the enigmas of identity and experience (while mercilessly satirizing the idiotic formulas of contemporary book talk).”

“A great book—fascinating, insanely compelling. I admire the way a…what’s the word?…momentum builds from the accumulation of questions, framing a full portrait of an individual. I love Barthelme’s Q&A stories for the power dynamic in conversation that is revealed in them; Shields manages the same thing here without supplying (but by sometimes implying) the A part.”

“Very, very funny.”

“I love this experimental, daring, relentless work. Just when you think David Shields couldn’t further rethink and reinvent literature, he does it again. The Very Last Interview confirms Shields as the most dangerously important American writer since William S. Burroughs.”

“Remixing and reimagining 2,000 of the most annoying questions he’s been asked during his forty-year writing life, David Shields’s The Very Last Interview is an often hilarious, operatically tragic sojourn across American cultural life. What do we expect of our writers, of intellectual history, of fame, of celebrity? All the answers are in the questions. Shields turns inside out whatever glamour remains attached to an artistic life in this book that’s at once charming and damning.”

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