SOURCE: "The Raw and the Cooked," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXVI, No. 12, July 20, 1989, pp. 30-1.

In the following excerpt, Towers applauds Shields's literary style and ability to "stage scenes" but charges that Dead Languages concentrates too narrowly on Jeremy's preoccupations.

During the past decade in particular, the line separating fiction from autobiography has frequently seemed on the point of being almost erased. Novel after novel has appeared in which not only the background and chronology but also the major events of the first-person narrator's life closely parallel what is publicly known of the author's. The material is offered up uncooked, so to speak, without the subtlety and depth derived from imaginative transmuting of personal experience into fiction. The gains in journalistic immediacy are generally offset by the absence of the play of novelistic invention (a very different matter from autobiographical fibbing in the manner...