“Remote should, in retrospect, be seen as one of the definitive texts of the 1990s… a mordant meditation on the odd way we live now—in the thrall of celebrity, at the mercy of the media, at once desperate for authenticity and in love with artifice” -- A.O. Scott, Newsday
“An idiosyncratic, droll, ravishing assemblage that both investigates and replicates the fragmented, irony-poisoned, celebrity-obsessed consciousness of fin-de-siecle America.” -- Kirkus Reviews
“In the current craze of personal and family memoirs, David Shields's Remote is unique. It's a mishmash, a potpourri; it's impersonal, it's embarrassingly revealing. It's very funny, and it tells us more than we want to know about American life.” -- Carolyn See, Washington Post
“The talented Mr. Shields gives us a clever collection of vignettes, descriptions, commentaries, and aperçus held together by the author's voice and finely tuned sense of the absurd. Remote is elliptical, funny, and ironic.” -- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“An extraordinary book—wholly absorbing, brilliant, and utterly Shields's own. Early on, I thought of the word ‘extrospective’ to describe its wonderfully paradoxical method: one follows a character who is built out of the transient material of American popular culture but who turns into as singular a voice and (all irony intended) ‘personality’ as anyone now writing in America.” -- Jonathan Raban
“Refusing to cast his life in the pious scenarios of the recovery movement, with its convenient narrative arc of victimization, addiction, denial, revelation, and faith, he insists on trying to convey the unredeemed flotsam and jetsam of daily American experience. Shields is a master of the fragment, which allows him to spotlight the isolated geekiness of a particular subject, while also weaving thematic links between the pieces. Each fragment can be a mini-essay, a prose poem, a list, vignette, or some other framing device. The white space between sections permits easy jumps from the personal to the impersonal, the trivial to the lofty. By employing this mosaic technique, Shields operates here in an essayistic line that includes Joan Didion and Richard Rodriguez, and which can be traced back to the seminal Walter Benjamin, with his ‘One Way Street’ and ‘A Berlin Childhood’ suites that collaged recollections with speculative analyses about modern forms of advertising and coping. In this modernist tradition, the fragment underscores the lack of coherence and causality in contemporary experience, and in the individual self.
One might also try to place Shields in the literary generation of such hyperventilating, hyper-footnoting, ‘voice’ writers as David Foster Wallace, Rick Moody, Nicholson Baker, and Dave Eggers. All of these experimental stylists have camped out at the intersection between high and low culture, fiction and nonfiction, reliable witnessing, and hypertrophied rationalization, or obsessive logorrhea. They reflect the postmodernist fascination with the undecidability of any one truth.
Shields' persona is more grounded, attractive, warm, cohesive and optimistic than his use of fragments and self-disclaimers would suggest. Overall, he comes off as a mensch.
We also become privy to more minute details, preferences, habits, tics, of such particularity that you almost have to go back to the great Montaigne to find an equivalently miniscule self-scrutiny.
Rather than evading the charge of self-absorption with a show of false humility, or self-justifying claims of acute suffering leading to triumph, he dives right into the comedy of narcissism, unraveling its extraordinary pettiness and insecurity. The reader is free to identify (squeamishly, of course) or feel superior. But either way, you had better be aware that Shields knows full well what he is doing: a part of him wants naturally to be loved; another part wants to provoke and irritate. He shows courage and sophistication in playing at the borders of acceptance, as well as in interrogating the autobiographical tradition. Along with Wayne Koestenbaum and Daniel Harris, Shields has gone the farthest of his generation, I think, in taking risks with autobiographical writing. He mocks naked self-absorption until it turns into its obverse, the dissolution of the ego.” --Phillip Lopate