... a blistering and brilliant quintet of reportage and observations from the forefront of the five parts of our lives suggested by its subtitle. It's not explicitly political in the sense that any leaders are mentioned. We know the names of leaders who have fallen on the sharp swords of temptations offered by sexual and political indiscretions, and the seduction of power to abuse it to one's own sexual gratification, and their narratives stay with us as we read these essays ... Shields knows that his readers aren't looking for socio-political commentary so much as creative non-fiction essays that are distinctly in his voice. He's a master deconstructionist, a visceral confessionalist ... While many of his past titles have flirted with the five themes in The Trouble With Men, never has it seemed so intense and concentrated. The confessional explosions that play themselves out in this book are equal parts terrifying, edifying, and beautifully troubling ... a difficult book to embrace, a problematic book to pin down, but that's the point. Shields might be a literary boxer, jabbing at us as we try to spar with him, a tender shot to the kidney or a harsh connection to the jaw, but at times he's also a master patchwork quilt artist ... Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn, and Power are the eternal quintet that has burdened and uplifted us, and in the masterful hands of David Shields they're illuminated in a dangerous, brilliant, eternal light.

Despite the broad diagnosis promised by the title, the focus is narrow, personal — and frank. Shields breaks the sound barrier for indiscretion ... In the past, I found Shields’s project occasionally impressive and more often exasperating. He’s fatally attracted to the manifesto and strident pronouncements on life and literature. But in this latest work, some of his masks and bombast fall away. He is wry and self-deprecating ... For the first time, this writer becomes good company — thankfully, for we have to travel a long way with him, deep into the labyrinth of his past ... The Trouble With Men is unabashedly queasy. Reading about Shields’s lust for Pippa Middleton ranks among the more depressing literary experiences of my life. But it’s curious that he doesn’t reckon more with what it means to expose himself (and his wife) so openly ... I often found this book beguiling, and moving. There is always the temptation, in writing about sex, to sound superior, arch, immune to its power. But Shields writes from a place of genuine curiosity and confusion. He is ridiculous and brave, he never conflates sincerity with genuine candor, and he poses the kinds of questions that only ever bring trouble...

By linking his thoughts and predilections with those of others, Shields offers the reader proof that other men feel as he does, want what he wants ... This interlinking takes getting used to, but the payoff can be huge when it’s the poignant examples from Shields’s own life ... By book’s end, we realize that Shields himself is a collage, coming to us in bits and pieces, slipping in and out of the words of others, offering up questions but few answers, forcing us to read between the lines. Many men operate this way, elusive, mute, masked. But Shields wants to be unmasked, to be real even if that means appearing weak or ugly.

What I am saying with certainty: 1) Shields’s latest book is solipsistic, as nearly all of his books have been; 2) Shields is Shields’s project, unapologetically and (it seems) eternally. That is fine with me, because the results are so worthy. But because he is a man over age 50, 3) his solipsism leads to sexism in The Trouble with Men, in ways he either didn’t see or that didn’t bother him ... What bothers me about all this is how thoughtlessly Shields forged his book, how little he considered sex and power issues beyond what concerns white males. Shields’s initial assumption in writing the book, that the culture needs more commentary from white middle-aged men on sex and pornography, appalls me ... No writer alive is as restlessly honest as David Shields. Such honesty has inherent value. But this book centers men again and again and again on a topic on which men have already said plenty. He confesses imperfectly and yet epically, inflating his sense of how sex and power work to an attitude he believes to be definitive, when it isn’t ... If heterosexual men are hopelessly tangled in a sexual tug-of-war, and they have the muscular advantage, what of the women on the other end of the rope? Shields—perhaps inexcusably—has left that equation out of his book altogether.

... this work comes across as the tedious provocations of a man desperate for any negative attention he can get ... I’m not always so aggrieved by a man lazily stroking his own libido. Accounts of someone’s arousal can be (and often are) comic, enlivening, and, at their best, contagious. Even chauvinism can be made delightful if delivered with enough panache; The Prisoner of Sex proved as much. But Shields’s presumption that his desire necessarily contains timeless insight—usually about women qua women and, less frequently, men qua men—makes him complacent, incurious: He quotes profligately, but what he shares simply reiterates his own tastes rather than building an argument or deepening comprehension ... But here’s the ruse: Shields’s appetite for rejection is just another way of keeping women confined to the sexual sphere. Throughout The Trouble with Men, women are consistently tagged by visual appeal ... These female figures are neither fully human nor fully object. They’re subjects, sort of, but their personhood becomes irrelevant beyond the bounds of the narrator’s libido. Shields desires, and women, those powerful paragons of beauty, are desired. It’s what any enlightened man would do.

...what gives the book its frisson is the sound of an intellectual talking dirty. One minute he’s quoting Dostoevsky, the next he’s asking his wife if he can share her vibrator. High/low, private/public: the demarcations disappear. And for all his talk of being miserable and pathetic, he takes a certain pleasure in the performance, with a good number of jokes. Above all, there’s his curiosity and openness, and his gift for collecting memorable quotations.

...revealing and confessional to the point of exhibitionism, personal to the point of shock ... but he's doing something incredibly rare in his book and doing it in a way that is undeniably powerful and thoughtful ... [it has] found a way to face a tortuous historical moment squarely and with neither cowardice or confusion.

...demands self-exposure at a level few writers have risked ... the first chapter of the five here calls itself, though tentatively, a 'love letter.' Yet when other authors gush in similar ways, in second person, the adoration seems untrammeled; see Vladimir Nabokov, the close of Speak, Memory. In Shields, however, the cuddles hide a claw, and spur him to what some would call TMI ... The many references to film complicate every image with which they’re paired, and the effect overall is of a stream of consciousness so jagged and rushed, it might be in sexual frenzy. No small feat— the book’s a wild ride full of unforgettable glimpses, really— but I do wish the stream did less meandering ... 'Is sex really that awful?' Shields asks...The question implies we’re going to get an answer, get somewhere, but page after page all we encounter is still more evidence that the human act of love is a helpless flailing between damaged puppets. Every one of the long essays, or whatever you’d call them, feels at times like just another puppet-whuppin' ... This sameness seems to me the great challenge, going forward, for this author. To reinvent the essay, even so brilliantly as he does, isn’t to rob the form of its search for meaning.

Snippets and subdivisions of thought, critiques, and inspired scenarios abound as the author’s entertaining musings range from confessional to examinations of oddities and taboo aspects of sexuality ... Entertaining and contemplative, Shields offers focused philosophy and effervescent wisdom on some of society’s knottiest topics. A sharp-eyed collection of bits and pieces that will appeal, at least in part, to readers on both hot and cold sides of the intimacy spectrum.