SOURCE: "Tales of a Man Young and Old, Snapshots of a Life," in The New York Times, December 27, 1991, p. C24.

Kakutani is an American critic who writes regularly for The New York Times. In the following review of A Handbook for Drowning, Kakutani claims that Shields's plot takes the "seemingly mundane" and "invests it with layers of psychological resonance."

In his last novel, the critically acclaimed Dead Languages (1989), David Shields turned the story of Jeremy Zorn, an adolescent boy with a bad stutter, into a kind of metaphor for the difficulties of communication and the limitations of language itself. Though the book occasionally threatened to buckle under the weight of its philosophical implications, its youthful hero and his family emerged as memorable and finely observed characters, people with the power to insinuate themselves into the reader's own imagination.

Now, in his latest book—a collection of interlinked stories...