Shields is at his best when parsing the information he gathers and when revealing the foibles of self. In one musing on a former lover with herpes, he writes: “For a multitude of reasons, the two of us didn’t belong together, but what interests me now is what, for lack of a better term, the free-floating signifier the virus was. When I was in love with her, it eroticized her. When I wasn’t, it repelled me. The body has no meanings. We bring meanings to it.”
And Shields does just that. Brings meaning to his own body, that of his aged father, also a writer (and whose writing peppers the book), and to the notions of life and death itself.
Moreover, bon mots like “Pain is inevitable… suffering is optional,” and this sagacity from American newspaper columnist Don Marquis (who died at 59): “Forty and forty-five are bad enough, fifty is simply hell to face; fifteen minutes after that you are sixty; and then in ten more minutes you are eighty five,” liven up the book and make the reader smile with delight.
I happen to know that David Shields is the same age as I am (53 now, although he was 50 when he began writing the book) as we went to college together and, I think, might have even shared a writing class. But buyer beware, I don’t know him at all, and I read his book with a stranger’s curiosity, wonder, and eventual delight. Shields is an interesting man who has lived an interesting life, as has his father, and both men have delightful, insightful and meaningful stories to share with us. The Thing About Life is poignant without being sappy or sentimental, serious and funny at the same time, and all about the life lessons we are taught when dealing with the truth of death.
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