MixedElectronic Book ReviewReality Hunger has a very New York feel about it. For all its manifesto-making, the book seems to work with a certain dignified confidence in its well-established context. It does not have the disheveled, slouching, skeptical, laughing insolence of the West Coast ... Much of the book feels like an argument about \'taste\' ... Why does Shields take so little interest in the American traditions that have worked more seriously, more murderously, in the name of the anti-realist? American modernists like William Carlos Williams. The Beats. Black Mountain poets. The great figures of postmodernism like Barth, Pynchon, and Ishmael Reed ... Here\'s the obvious thing that, for whatever reason, Shields doesn\'t recognize: the kind of work that he claims to want already exists in abundance ... I think this book reflects Shields\' visceral ambivalence about living in \'the shadow of celebrity\' that he rendered so powerfully in Remote.
