SOURCE: "The Media and Me," in New York Magazine, Vol. 29, No. 9, March 4, 1996, pp. 68-9.

Kirn is an American journalist, short story writer, novelist, and critic. In the following mixed review of Remote, he applauds the use of autobiographical "quick-take musings on the media" but claims that Shields's "comedy schlock references" are shallow and old.

Assuming that books are food for thought, we should be able to sort them into groups. There are the virtuous vegetables (poetry and essays). The sustaining meats and cheeses (literary novels, biographies, histories). The energizing grains and cereals (detective and romance novels, Hollywood memoirs). But there are newer, synthetic edibles, too, that are less the products of nature than of science. David Shields's Remote belongs to one of these. This breezy, sideways autobiography, which seeks to reveal the author's soul via some quick-take musings on the media, is the literary answer to fake fat...