SOURCE: "Shields' Fresh Stories of an American Coming of Age," in The Boston Globe, January 22, 1992.

Taylor is an American novelist as well as an art, music, film, and theater critic. In the following review, he discusses how the coming-of-age theme is advanced by Shields's literary style and the arrangement of the interconnected stories in A Handbook for Drowning.

David Shields brings fresh insights to an old theme, the shame and tenderness of an American coming of age. A Handbook for Drowning consists of 24 loosely linked stories about a young man named Walter Jaffe, a Holden Caulfield for the 1990s, whose self-absorbed blunders, painful as they are, represent stages of his growth.

Drowning, of course, is the operative image, and the stories make adroit use of beach, swimming pool, riverside and lake settings. The significance of the title, however, resides in ideology as well as in fears that one...