Is Donald Trump postmodern?

David Shields is an American author who has decided to collate many of the questions he’s been asked in interviews and reprint them – without any of his answers – under themes of Childhood, Art, Envy, Capitalism etc. The idea is that the questions put to him are just as revealing as his responses. This is a gimmick, but not merely that. To map how others interrogate us is an original idea.

It follows that the best way of testing whether this works for the length of a book, even one as short as this, would be for the book to be reviewed by someone who had no prior knowledge of Shields. In this, I’m your man. My ignorance of him was immaculate – and I’ve kept it that way, for the duration. The only check I did make was whether this book was in any way related to the ‘The Last Interview’ series published by Melville House, which has devoted volumes to Borges, Marilyn Monroe, David Bowie, García Márquez and others. It isn’t. So the first thing I learned about Shields is that he’s a bit of a rip-off artist, giving his book that title. The content confirms that ‘sampling’ is an abiding feature of his work.

What else has one discovered? That he loves epigraphs. The book is introduced by several, and each chapter by more. The first for the first chapter (on Process), is from Jonathan Goldstein: ‘Life is about failing. It is about letting the tape play.’ Utter drivel. But it tells us that Shields is a romantic. Further on, introducing the chapter on Brokenness, we are vouchsafed Tolstoy: ‘The only absolute knowledge attained by man is that life is meaningless.’