Reality Hunger by David Shields
Sean O'Hagan is intrigued by a bold book that rails against the confines of traditional fiction
The Observer, Saturday 27 February 2010

"David Shields is bored by the novel. As a form, he argues, it tends to be too hidebound by plot, too traditional and old-fashioned to reflect the speed of 21st-century culture. He is particularly bored by the well-wrought, beautifully written literary novel, as exemplified by Ian McEwan's Atonement and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections.

"'I read these books and my overwhelming feeling is, you've got to be kidding,' he told the Observer recently. "They strike me as antediluvian texts that are essentially still working in the Flaubertian novel mode. In no way do they convey what if feels like to live in the 21st century. Like most novels, they are essentially works of nostalgic entertainment"...