SOURCE: "Shields' 'First Novel' Comes Now, after Several Others," in The Hartford Courant, January 12, 1992.

In the following review, Coates discusses the themes and arrangement of the interconnected stories in A Handbook for Drowning.

Time was when a writer published his first novel first. In a kinder, gentler time, publishers often went out on a limb financially to print a youngster's obligatorily autobiographical coming-of-age fiction. It is the kind of thing one has to write early to get the self out of the way, as Nabokov said, concluding with the protagonist producing (voilà!) the very book the reader was holding.

Since the first novel has become a cliché relegated to roundup reviews, savvy fiction writers now usually open with something more accomplished, as David Shields did with his actual first novel, Heroes, in 1984, which was that rare thing, a really good sports novel that did with basketball what Mark...