Handbook for Drowning: A Novel in Stories

Fiction – Literary | StringTown Press | Paperback | 2007 |With a new foreword by Stuart Dybek| $14.00 | 978-0-97-189676-5|Originally published by Knopf in 1992

About This Book

“Shields again demonstrates his ability to conjure up the past by using lyrical, rhythmic language to relate ordinary events.  He possesses a gift for taking a seemingly mundane moment … and investing it with layers of psychological resonance.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Handbook for Drowning:  A Novel in Stories concerns the education of Walter Jaffe, an impassioned, awkward, and engaging young man growing up fixated on his parents’ political idealism and his own morality.  In college, Walter is obsessed with the heroic mode of Prometheus and Beethoven until he sees in a documentary film a scene of American soldiers with Vietnamese prostitutes; Walter is monomaniacally in love with Nina, talking in riddles about a dead baby sea gull, reading her diary while she’s asleep, pushing their closeness to the breaking point; Walter is so intent upon analyzing his parents’ letters to him that he can’t see the baffled love they feel for each other or for him; at fifteen, Walter is fraught with desire for every girl he sees on the street, but unable to dance up close with the girl who wants him; even in dreams, Walter is in combat with his father, although in waking life their conflict helps him understand that any obsession (any ideology, any fear) can become a kind of drowning. David Shields has written a book that, constantly confounding easy expectations, goes beyond formulas to human experience in all its disorder and mystery.

For Discussion

1. In “The Imaginary Dead Baby Seagull,” Nina writes in her journal that Walt was “laughing. Laughing at lust!” Is this true, or is there something deeper and more complex behind Walt’s “laughter”?
2. In the same chapter, Nina is desperate for Walt to swim out and try and save the baby seagull; what motivates her, and why is it so important to her that Walt take on this impossible mission?
3. What does the novel’s anti-linear structure achieve and how does it affect your reaction to the characters’ fates? For instance, we know that Walt’s mother dies from cancer and yet she also appears in later chapters. How does this change the focus of the book?
4. Swimming and drowning are central motifs, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively. In “A Brief Survey of Ideal Desire,” how does Walt swim? Or does he, in a sense, drown?
5. How do the book’s political backgrounds (the Rosenbergs, the Vietnam War, desegregation, etc.) inform your reading of the motives of Walt and his family?
6. Reread the passage on pp. 144 – 145; what are we meant to take away from the last line: “. . . . he was swimming in open water”? What has Walt accomplished or will he accomplish? Given that the ending is the chronological beginning, how affirmative of an ending is this?
7. Toward the end of the book, Nina and Walt get into an argument over what he would do if she were threatened by rape; Nina says, “Hope isn’t good enough.” How does this help to explain the differences between the two characters? Why is Walt so drawn to Nina?
8. Revisit the scene on pp. 128-129 when Sylvia, Walt’s mother, asks him to help her commit suicide. How did you feel when you first read this passage? In what ways does Sylvia’s impossible request echo the requests Nina makes throughout the novel?
9. Why is the poem Walt finds among his mother’s personal effects so moving and significant to him?
10. How does the lack of affection between Walt’s parents influence the difficulty he has with his Nina? How is this struggle deepened by Leonard’s admission to his son that after Sylvia’s death he has been more sexual active with another woman than he had been in twenty-five years with Sylvia?
11. Early in the novel, Walt lies to his father about losing the sweater his grandfather gave him as a present. Why does Leonard slap his son for lying? Compare this moment to Walt stealing baseball cards and then working for months to save up the money from his allowance to pay the store back for his crime.
12. Is there a turning point in the book? If so, what it is?
13. Why is Walt drawn so powerfully to the Greek tragedy Prometheus Bound? Consider Walt’s line to Nina: “The admirable thing about Prometheus is that he accepts his fate without ever even hoping for another outcome.”
14. Before reading Handbook for Drowning, had you ever read any of David Shields’s other books? Do you see any similarities between Handbook for Drowning and these other books?

About the Author

David Shields is the author of ten books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestseller The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead (which was published by Knopf last year and is now available as a Vintage paperback), Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (which is forthcoming from Knopf in February 2010), Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season (a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity (winner of the PEN Revson Award), and Dead Languages: A Novel (winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award). His work has been translated into ten languages.
The chair of the 2007 National Book Awards nonfiction panel, he has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Yale Review, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney’s, and Believer, and he’s written reviews for the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Globe, and Philadelphia Inquirer. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is a professor of English at the University of Washington;  he is also a member of the faculty in Warren Wilson College’s low-residency MFA Program for Writers, in Asheville, North Carolina.

http://www.davidshields.com