I Think You're Totally Wrong by David Shields

conflict of interest it’s transparent. The lit world should be so forthcoming. The lit community praises the lit community, there’s a dearth of constructive criticism, and there’s a fuck of a lot of praise for boring books.
    DAVID: You’re preachin’ to the choir, brother.
    CALEB: We need more of Dale Peck’s
Hatchet Jobs
and Anis Shivani’s “The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers.” Shivani went after Jhumpa Lahiri and Junot Díaz and Sharon Olds.
    DAVID: That would be just the beginning of my critique.
    CALEB: If we can’t criticize, we stay in the muck, and the literary world shrinks proportionately to the culture. Who trusts or even reads positive reviews? Would you rather have a positive review read by a hundred people, or a negative review read by a thousand? You wrote about how painful negative reviews were in the past, and now you don’t care. You were inferring, almost, that it’s more painful if some intimate shows disinterest.
    DAVID: One of the accomplishments for me of middle age is, boy, can I shrug off criticism. It used to be, I’d get a bad review in the
Orlando Sentinel
, and I’d dwell on it inordinately. Now I literally don’t have time. Somebody writes a six-thousand-word attack on
Reality Hunger
? I’m thrilled the book got so deeply under his skin.

    DAVID: How’s Scott Driscoll doing?
    CALEB: He read
Reality Hunger
. He’s a very good critic. He loves fiction.
    DAVID: Yeah, and?
    CALEB: He’s responsible for that opening of our interview in the
Rumpus
, when I asked, “You began writing fiction; it turned out not to be your forte. Why the attack? Isn’t that like an impotent man vowing abstinence?”
    DAVID: Only about fifty other reviewers used the same trope. I’d say I’m more like a man in love pointing out to the man on Viagra that he’s fucking a sex doll.
    CALEB: How long have you been rehearsing that one?

    DAVID: You’re a funny intersection of hippie and military.
    CALEB: My dad was in Saigon for a year, and my parentswere in Asia for eight years. He has no clue about art, and she’s creative, quasi-bohemian. She knew I smoked pot and kept it from him. My dad won’t watch movies about genocide, anything negative, anything “depressing.” He’s “Who cares about the Holocaust? It’s over. Who cares?”
    DAVID: He’s anti-intellectual, but is he smart?
    CALEB: After Cooper Union he got a master’s from NYU in engineering. He’s very organized.
    DAVID: Is your mom intellectual at all?
    CALEB: She used to be well-read and big into art. Completely stopped.
    DAVID: What books would they be reading? She was reading something when I stopped by.
    CALEB: Probably
People
magazine. Their house is a museum. Every
National Geographic
since before 1920. Four sets of encyclopedias. There are probably over five thousand books. The classics: Homer, Shakespeare, Melville. I remember being forced to listen to
Beowulf
when I was ten. My dad, though, has a huge collection of Carter Brown mysteries, Alistair MacLean spy novels, and romance novels. He’s addicted to romance.

    CALEB: In high school I just read mystery, science fiction, and sports magazines, but I did browse our books and the
Nat Geos
. Not until college and wanting to become a writer did I read. I was getting into philosophy, Christianity.
    DAVID: Your book is definitely coming back to me. It deals with those three friends—Mark, Vince, and “you.” Still seems like it could be a good book.
    CALEB: You’re misremembering a little. It was based on Mark and Vince, but I made them into one character whose dad’s dead. Both Mark and Vince lost a parent in high school. You said about it, “I’m especially impressed by the narrator’s ability to compress his meditations into startling aphorisms, and at crucial moments—sex, love, drugs, religion, nature,