Since the publication of Reality Hunger in 2010, David Shields has been a busy man. Part of his argument in that book was that non-fiction is better adapted than fiction to address the realities of the modern world. And the volumes he has published in recent years have been an illustration of how resourceful and diverse non-fiction can be. But missing from Shields’s Wikipedia entry is an as-told-to book composed in collaboration with his wife’s cousin, That Thing You Do With Your Mouth, subtitled “The Sexual Autobiography of Samantha Matthews”. In transcribing her story, Shields tells us, he hoped to satiate his interest in the subject of sex; instead it “only sharpened my appetite to explore the matter further, in and for myself”. The Trouble With Men is the sum of those further explorations.
Sex, he says, has always been a major part of his life, even when he’s not been having it. Indeed he’s tempted to think that “sex is everything”. Still, he has a particular reason for writing about it now. That’s not because of #MeToo; the book’s title may suggest a mea culpa on behalf of the gender but male predatoriness or abuse of power isn’t the theme. And it’s not merely driven by a wish to push the boundaries of candour (“It would be such a relief to be honest, for once”). His motive is to start a conversation: “The only reason it’s being written … is to talk, finally, to you.”
The “you” is his wife. Though he never names her, he talks to her throughout. The book is a test: not just the usual challenge of a memoir (how much frankness can the reader take?) but a more intimate one (will his wife ever forgive him?). He’s willing, or at any rate impelled, to risk their marriage by opening it up to public scrutiny. They’ve been together for many years. But she remains a mystery to him (“I still don’t know you at all”) and even after all this time basic questions remain: “Do I love you? Do you love me? What kind of marriage do we want? ... Do you love making love with me? (Don’t answer.)” His wife has been “the perfect muse, a ceaseless spur”, not by nurturing his books but by failing to like them. That she’s also against the idea of this one is an incentive: “It’s so perfect that you don’t want me to write this book (because you don’t want to read it); therefore I have to write it. So, too, if you were fine with me writing it, I’d have no desire to write it.”
If that sounds contrary, he’s not apologising. Without contrariness there is no progression. Their marriage could have slid into senescent torpor by now, but opposition is keeping it alive. In their personalities and pursuits, he and his wife could hardly be more different but “If there were no difference, what would become of desire?” The impression he leaves of her isn’t flattering: “a woman of icy temperament”, domineering, Scottishly severe, more affectionate to their cat than to him, and singularly lacking in romance (she has no photos of him anywhere, whereas his of her are scattered all round his office). “In love there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek,” and it’s he who makes all the effort. “How did I get designated to ‘work hard’ in sex while you do nothing?” he asks. Or “Why do all your favourite books about marriage include a dead spouse?”
His list of complaints might be read as a petition for divorce. In fact they’re a kind of tribute or love letter: her mistreatment of him is exactly what he needs. She’s subtly sadistic, he subtly masochistic, and that’s why the marriage works. “Female indifference has always been incredibly erotic to me … Our sexual inclinations align.” Not that he reveals what she’s like, and what she likes, between the sheets. For all his candour, that would be a betrayal too far. In the best Rousseauesque tradition of confessionalism, the person most shamingly exposed is the author.
As a child, Shields was taught to hate himself by his mother, “a terrifying figure of Olympian hauteur and disdain”; thereafter what he looked for in a woman was a “reservoir of coldness”. He wasn’t unpopular at school (a keen sportsman, he has never known happiness to equal that of playing basketball), but there were paranoid moments at the swimming pool lockers when the other boys seemed to be sniggering at the size of his penis (he’d have liked to explain to them that he’s a “grow-er not a show-er”). Still a virgin at 19, he ruined things with his first girlfriend by admitting he’d secretly read her diary entries about him. “I’m always the poor pup that loses,” he concludes, and that’s why he’s drawn to the poor pups of literature, the self-harmers and self-destroyers. It’s also what he wants from sex, to be humiliated: “I need to believe you hate me and go to bed with me only because you have to … The only thing that’s sexy to me is what hurts.”
It’s brave of Shields to parade himself as cravenly as he does and he covers a lot of ground along the way: anal sex, oral sex, porn (“the world’s one true religion”), cross-dressing, scatological fixations, foot fetishism and so on. Not that he’s into them all, but he’s trying to solve the puzzle of who he is, “to find out how in the world I got wired this way”. His masochism is more than Jewish self-hatred. The best authors have it too: is there “any ‘major’ modernist writer – Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Proust, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, TS Eliot – who wasn’t flagrantly masochistic?”
He even connects masochism to his habit of quoting authors without attribution. In Reality Hunger he defended it as a principled stand against copyright laws. Here he admits it was also “a way to be ‘bad’ and get spanked”.
He won’t get spanked this time. The basic method remains the same – his argument set out through a collage of thematically linked fragments, with him as both author and curator – but the writers he draws on are given their due in square brackets. He takes swipes at some of them: Norman Mailer “and his insane theories about the rectum and the devil and eternity”, Philip Roth (“It’s just sex. He rarely examines what his characters want from sex”), Nicholson Baker (“Only in America could a novelist who writes about sex as if it were a subset of the Shopping Channel be praised as the thinking person’s pornographer”), Susan Sontag (“getting it wrong, as always”) and so on. But most of the authors are there to legitimise his ideas and experiences, and to show that he’s not alone in his frailties.
He may be breaking no taboos but 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 (“The only music I’ve ever really loved is lamentation”), he takes a certain pleasure in the performance, with a good number of jokes (“Did you hear about the Scottish woman who loved her husband so much she nearly told him?”). Above all, there’s his curiosity and openness, and his gift for collecting memorable quotations.
The book comes with fulsome advance praise: “A great book such as no one has ever written”; “The most boldly naked book I’ve ever read”, “The most original, insightful and heartbreaking book about sexual desire since Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse”. Shields, less extravagantly, calls it “much the most self-mortifying” of his books. What will his wife think? She once told him that what he regards as his weakness she sees as his vulnerability, “which I love”. And Shields’s truth-telling is certainly vulnerable. Some room for hope, then, that their marriage might survive publication.
• The Trouble With Men: Reflections on Sex, Love, Marriage, Porn and Power is published by Mad Creek.
