Despite Glimmers of Wit, A Novel That's Overdone

ALL of us have encountered problems with language--at times we have had difficulty saying exactly what we wanted to say or even speaking at all. Moments like these make us painfully aware of the limitations of language, of our language. We realize that speech is a labor of love, an effort to obliterate the spaces and experiences that block our understanding of one another, render them irrelevant in some human communion. Paradoxically, these failings of language and speech connect us--our blighted attempts become a universal tie in the human experience.

All of which makes David Shields' heavy-handed, almost clinical exploration of these inevitable limitations somewhat disappointing. The premise of Shields' Dead Languages--assuming a novel can or should have a premise--is that "language...takes you where it wants to go, which may not be into life," and that "all languages--when they are used as masks, as hiding places for the feelings of the heart--are dead."

Shields develops these concepts in the setting of a potentially dynamic California family, tells his story through the eyes of a stuttering boy intimidated and obsessed by others' mastery of language. It is a fascinating starting point, but the story stagnates.

Dead Languages

By David Shields

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989

$18.95

The 246-page narrative moves slowly through 21 years of stutterer Jeremy Zorn's life. There is a rough chronology, but more free association, as one would find in a psychiatric session. Narrated in the first person, the book reads like a record of therapy. Jeremy's speech therapist Sandra is addressed in apostrophe and hangs over much of the book like some Poe-esque confidant.

And the narrator is considerate enough, through all the action, to outline the psychological interpretations, the implications of the course of events on his psyche, in case the readers are not well enough versed in Freudian theory.

At one point in the book, Jeremy's mother and object of his Oedipal complex "said in her entire life she'd met only one person more self-involved." The narrator is terribly self-involved, and the narrative cannot help but be overbearing.

JEREMY'S problems are not limited to self-centeredness and disfluencies in his speech. He is also cursed with bad--nearly disfiguring--acne. His father is depressed and unstable; his sister is brilliant and outshines him; his mother is strong-willed and oppresses him along with the rest of her relatives.

In many ways, this novel is more a chronicle of the family than of Jeremy's childhood. But all the characters are flat and do nothing for the work's landscape. Jeremy's mother is unbelievably callous. She is a well-known, talented journalist who carries her notebook with her everywhere and sees a feature article in every crisis in her son's life.

And the crises are so numerous that they eventually lose their pull for readers. Jeremy feels inadequate in speech, in school and within his family. His only forte is sports--on the basketball court he feels confident and free. But even that endeavor is thwarted.

When he is 15, Jeremy sees his reflection in a beach house and, runs toward the cliff in a fit of self-loathing, and jumps. His attempt at suicide is a failure, but he manages to break his leg in many places and put an end to his athletic career.

This incident is fast (it takes place in a couple of pages), and the book never significantly deals with the aftermath of the accident, so it seems to be just another contrived misfortune in a long string. Jeremy is the Charlie Brown of modern adolescent fiction. By the time Jeremy finds a voice, we are so wary as not to care.

WHAT prevents the book from becoming unbearably tedious is its sharp wit. There are moments in the book when the readers laugh aloud: a seven-year-old who chainsmokes steals the change he is supposed to be counting; a lisping grade-schooler is cured after doctors find "a button, a staple, a postage stamp and two buffalo nickels" in his stomach; a heated school election eventually degenerates into a food riot.

These moments are welcome in a book that frequently takes itself too seriously, and can throw out platitudes such as "The city boy who hates the city leaves the city to perfect a speech in absolute supremacy of the city...We all choose a calling that's the most radical contradiction of ourselves."

But the book has merits apart from its wit. Shields uses imagery well and has mastered setting and dialogue, though he occasionally lapses into the cliched. Undeniably, he does have a nice turn of phrase, especially in his satire:

I guess the idea was that Mother was impressing him with how serious she was and Barry was impressing her with how serious he was and Father and I were impressing them with how we were just a couple of charter members of the hoi polloi who liked to eat food.

Shields' book is fascinating, if not engrossing, and there are glimmers of truth and insights offered in this highly intellectualized package. It is unfortunate, though, that something as beautiful as language and something as poignant and painful as its failings were etherized and dissected on a obviously talented writer's table.