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Dead Languages
In Dead Languages by David Shields, Jeremy Zorn's mother tries unsuccessfully to coax him into saying "Philadelphia," and his life becomes framed by his unwieldy attempts at articulation. Through family rituals with his word-obsessed parents and sister, failed first love, an ill-fated run for class president, as the only Jewish boy on an otherwise all-black basketball team, all of the passages of Jeremy's life are marked in some way by his stutter and his wildly off-the-mark attempts at a cure. It is only when he enters college and learns his strong-willed mother is dying that he realizes all languages, when used as hiding places for the heart, are dead ones.
246 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1986
6 people are currently reading
179 people want to read
About the author
David Shields
76 books264 followersDavid Shields is the author of fourteen books, including Reality Hunger (Knopf, 2010), which was named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications. GQ called it "the most provocative, brain-rewiring book of 2010"; the New York Times called it "a mind-bending manifesto." His previous book, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), was a New York Times bestseller. His other books include Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Yale Review, Believer, Village Voice, Salon, Slate, McSweeney's, and Utne Reader; he's written reviews for the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Boston Globe, and Philadelphia Inquirer. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
March 29, 2024
I gave this a 4 because I couldn’t give it a 3.8. Overall, I enjoyed this book and resonated with the main character Jeremy in many aspects. He is a boy who grows up being haunted by his struggle to speak fluently in a family and world that revolve around language. As a language lover, it was enlightening to read about how one could resent it entirely. Anyone who comes from a dysfunctional family can relate in some degree to this book. I do not believe this is a great story per se, but it did cause me to reflect upon my own life at many points, which in my opinion, makes it a story worth reading. Personally, I found this book to be written in a style similar to Lolita in terms of its cadence and layout (not in subject material), which can make it a tad difficult to keep track of at times.
June 20, 2020
4.5 stars, video review to follow
July 12, 2014
A third of the way into this book I was ready to give up on it. Nothing was happening, time sequence was out of order, characters entered and retreated randomly... It was more like an author's stream of consciousness. I find those very self-indulgent, selfish, and tedious. I did stay with it, though, and eventually sorted out most of the details. It still annoyed me that Shields alternately refers to his mother by name or by simply "Mother", or perhaps it was some other woman he called by name. How are we to know? Was I supposed to be keeping notes in order to keep his characters straight? But in the end, it didn't make any difference. I simply couldn't get that into it, or identify with anyone. It didn't help that other than some place names, there was nothing to give this story feet. There were no time references (I don't even know what ERA it is, but anyway he switches places in the past at will) or little else to allow the reader to locate the story with any sense of reference. I finished the book somewhat wondering, "What was the point?"
January 27, 2026
". . . I buried my head in Mother's lap and burst into tears. It was a wonderful feeling to produce such loud and continuous sound after I'd been silent for so long. A truly excellent cry redistributes the bones of the body; with the cessation of sobbing, I felt more completely cleaned out than I've ever felt before or since . . . it was as if the most complete emptiness had suddenly passed into purity. I thought the ugly language living in my soul had finally been killed. The future held in store only flashing phrases; perfect sentences; burning, noble words."
Upon learning that my current prose professor, David Shields, is the author of ~25 books, I perused his website and homed in on a few titles I thought would interest me. I learned that his second novel, Dead Languages, was about a boy who struggled with a stutter and thereby came to worship words. The university library had a copy, so I ran up to the stacks and checked it out. It's been a really unique experience to read his prose on the page, and simultaneously hear his critiques and thoughts in class (ENGL 484 - Advanced Prose Workshop). Knowing this fictional memoir was in part based on Professor Shields' own experiences, and being told in the first person, it was hard not to read it in his voice.
I loved the structure of the book. We open with a sort of thesis about Demosthenes, an ancient orator with a stutter who would practice his speeches with pebbles in his mouth until "words became waves within him." We then launch into an introduction of Jeremy Zorn and his family (journalist mother & father, and academic sister), followed by ~250 pages of roughly sequential experiences ranging from about age four to the present, where the narrator is in his early twenties. He never overtly states, but it becomes clear that the book is addressed to his current speech therapist, and perhaps some researchers, which was very interesting. Jeremy's stutter is the throughline to the book's events, but not every episode directly has to do with the impediment. What is consistent is that Jeremy is always posed as a victim, where every good thing in his life turns sour, and every sour thing is the worst. The narrator never assumes a "Wo is me" attitude, but based on the events he chooses to address and the way he chooses to frame them, it is apparent that perhaps his greatest stumbling block is himself—more on that later.
It was really intriguing to track Jeremy's obsession with language develop throughout childhood and adolescence. One particularly striking scene was when he was seven, and asked his friend Charles to help him count a big jar of pennies he'd gotten from his grandfather:
". . . I was in rapture over that whisper. I lost all comprehension of sense—Charles could have been counting backwards from a thousand, for all I knew or cared—and listened only to sound: the incessant scrape of copper sliding across wood and clinking in his hands; the unnecessary and thus incantatory repetition . . . but most especially the beginning of my best friend's baritone: the still small voice of a seven-year-old boy, the faint tone in which secrets are told."
I felt frustrated and in anguish with Jeremy as he consistently sought his mother's approval and never got it, neither in writing nor in speech. I was obsessed with Jeremy's endless means of shutting himself out and differentiating himself from the rest of the family and the world—a brief vow of silence on a trip; running all the time; writing satirical pieces for his own paper; obsessing over his skin; sequestering himself in the stacks of a library and hardly bathing—Jeremy had a host of problems, but the biggest one may have been himself (again, more on that later).
I was impressed with Jeremy's ability to sum up complex emotion or sensation succinctly (which, at one point, he states is the purpose of the book). Such as this moment after his sister Beth breaks down while their mother suffers from cancer:
"Trivial victory often rings empty and releases a sadness so deep there's no conceivable comfort. You just stare and smile and hope it vanishes, but there's absolutely nothing you can say."
It was a great book. It was an uncompromising self-portrait, and I'd be curious to know but will never ask how much of this was based in reality. Just yesterday in class Professor Shields shared this quote from Denis Johnson: "Write naked. That means to write what you would never say. Write in blood." He also urged us to find what we are most afraid of and write about that. Food for thought. Also, I was really struck by the short story included about a man watching his blind downstairs neighbor die, but never realizing she is blind. I want to figure out what that could mean...
I'll close out with how the book ends (so, spoilers). I keep saying Jeremy was ultimately his own greatest stumbling block, and that is showcased by the closing of the book. He remembers building a model of their own home for school, but unlike reality, he built out the garage as a building all on its own beside the house, with no doors, no windows, and a solid roof. We close with how he remembers his mother reacting to that model, followed by an insert of a short story Jeremy had written about a version of himself called Ethan:
" 'Jeremy,' she said, 'Jeremy sweetheart, are you ever just going to come inside with everyone else and get warm?'
"She touched his nose and cheeks, tousled his hair, kissed his forehead with dry lips. Ethan's mother smelled like laundry mixed with buttermilk. She leaned forward and he held her in his arms but was afraid of hurting her with too hard a hug, so he set her back down against the pillow and let go, moving away."
Upon learning that my current prose professor, David Shields, is the author of ~25 books, I perused his website and homed in on a few titles I thought would interest me. I learned that his second novel, Dead Languages, was about a boy who struggled with a stutter and thereby came to worship words. The university library had a copy, so I ran up to the stacks and checked it out. It's been a really unique experience to read his prose on the page, and simultaneously hear his critiques and thoughts in class (ENGL 484 - Advanced Prose Workshop). Knowing this fictional memoir was in part based on Professor Shields' own experiences, and being told in the first person, it was hard not to read it in his voice.
I loved the structure of the book. We open with a sort of thesis about Demosthenes, an ancient orator with a stutter who would practice his speeches with pebbles in his mouth until "words became waves within him." We then launch into an introduction of Jeremy Zorn and his family (journalist mother & father, and academic sister), followed by ~250 pages of roughly sequential experiences ranging from about age four to the present, where the narrator is in his early twenties. He never overtly states, but it becomes clear that the book is addressed to his current speech therapist, and perhaps some researchers, which was very interesting. Jeremy's stutter is the throughline to the book's events, but not every episode directly has to do with the impediment. What is consistent is that Jeremy is always posed as a victim, where every good thing in his life turns sour, and every sour thing is the worst. The narrator never assumes a "Wo is me" attitude, but based on the events he chooses to address and the way he chooses to frame them, it is apparent that perhaps his greatest stumbling block is himself—more on that later.
It was really intriguing to track Jeremy's obsession with language develop throughout childhood and adolescence. One particularly striking scene was when he was seven, and asked his friend Charles to help him count a big jar of pennies he'd gotten from his grandfather:
". . . I was in rapture over that whisper. I lost all comprehension of sense—Charles could have been counting backwards from a thousand, for all I knew or cared—and listened only to sound: the incessant scrape of copper sliding across wood and clinking in his hands; the unnecessary and thus incantatory repetition . . . but most especially the beginning of my best friend's baritone: the still small voice of a seven-year-old boy, the faint tone in which secrets are told."
I felt frustrated and in anguish with Jeremy as he consistently sought his mother's approval and never got it, neither in writing nor in speech. I was obsessed with Jeremy's endless means of shutting himself out and differentiating himself from the rest of the family and the world—a brief vow of silence on a trip; running all the time; writing satirical pieces for his own paper; obsessing over his skin; sequestering himself in the stacks of a library and hardly bathing—Jeremy had a host of problems, but the biggest one may have been himself (again, more on that later).
I was impressed with Jeremy's ability to sum up complex emotion or sensation succinctly (which, at one point, he states is the purpose of the book). Such as this moment after his sister Beth breaks down while their mother suffers from cancer:
"Trivial victory often rings empty and releases a sadness so deep there's no conceivable comfort. You just stare and smile and hope it vanishes, but there's absolutely nothing you can say."
It was a great book. It was an uncompromising self-portrait, and I'd be curious to know but will never ask how much of this was based in reality. Just yesterday in class Professor Shields shared this quote from Denis Johnson: "Write naked. That means to write what you would never say. Write in blood." He also urged us to find what we are most afraid of and write about that. Food for thought. Also, I was really struck by the short story included about a man watching his blind downstairs neighbor die, but never realizing she is blind. I want to figure out what that could mean...
I'll close out with how the book ends (so, spoilers). I keep saying Jeremy was ultimately his own greatest stumbling block, and that is showcased by the closing of the book. He remembers building a model of their own home for school, but unlike reality, he built out the garage as a building all on its own beside the house, with no doors, no windows, and a solid roof. We close with how he remembers his mother reacting to that model, followed by an insert of a short story Jeremy had written about a version of himself called Ethan:
" 'Jeremy,' she said, 'Jeremy sweetheart, are you ever just going to come inside with everyone else and get warm?'
"She touched his nose and cheeks, tousled his hair, kissed his forehead with dry lips. Ethan's mother smelled like laundry mixed with buttermilk. She leaned forward and he held her in his arms but was afraid of hurting her with too hard a hug, so he set her back down against the pillow and let go, moving away."
May 5, 2008
For me, this novel told the story about how people's lives can be shaped (and somewhat doomed) through the prism of language. Jeremy, the protagonist, is born with a stutter which makes him self consciously aware of all manners of the spoken word. His mother, on the other hand, is a journalist, and filters HER entire life through the written word. In different ways, they are both extra sensitive to the nature of language and the way in which they can use language to manipulate a situation, but also the way in which their use of language defines and limits them.
January 31, 2016
The main theme of book is somewhat similar with mine.Nice one, loved the book.
March 21, 2025
Couldn’t get past half way through. Feels like a terrible knock off of Catcher in the Rye. Characters felt empty, dialogue was pretentious, and the flow of time was incomprehensible. The concept is interesting but the author does nothing to show the suffering of an inability to communicate. The main character is just some spoiled brat who acts in suffering and then brags of how great and popular he actually is. Just made me mad…
February 28, 2024
3.5 stars. Decent read if you keep a dictionary nearby. Stuttering boy with mentally ill dad and uncomforting mom and overweight high achievement sister. He has a series of shallow failed relationships as he watches his mother die of cancer.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 19, 2016
A beautiful novel by David Shields. Yes, a novel.
October 27, 2009
Not a review, but an issue that cam up while reading this book that I'm not quite sure of what to make. I read this novel after reading Shields's recent memoir "The Thing About Life is that One Day You'll be Dead" and noticed that there are about ten times where the exact same passages exist in both books. For example, Shields struggled with acne as a teen, and gives a rather vivid description of it in his memoir. The narrator in the novel has the same struggle, and the description of it is exactly the same, word for word, as the other book. The same examples exist describing the fathers of both characters.
Can an artist plagiarize themselves? I realize that one is fiction and the other nonfiction, but this seems lazy to me. There was a sixteen year gap between when these two books were written (the novel was written first). I'm all for taking parts of actual life and injecting it into fiction, and have done so myself many times. Anyway, I'm interested in what other writers think about this.
Can an artist plagiarize themselves? I realize that one is fiction and the other nonfiction, but this seems lazy to me. There was a sixteen year gap between when these two books were written (the novel was written first). I'm all for taking parts of actual life and injecting it into fiction, and have done so myself many times. Anyway, I'm interested in what other writers think about this.
September 10, 2012
[An] unfortunate fact about disfluency is that it prevents you from entirely losing self-consciousness when expressing such traditional and truly important emotions as love, hate, joy, and deep pain. Always first aware not of the naked feeling itself but of the best way to phrase the feeling so as to avoid verbal repetition, you come to think of emotions as belonging to other people, being the world's happy property and not yours- not really yours except by way of disingenuous circumlocution (96).
I thought The Dead were maybe an occult group that scavenged shallow graves, looking for dybbuks, since Audrey's friends liked to say that, at thirteen, they had lived and loved and now were ready to die. They'd gone out in the world and found it a waste, whereas I was still trying to build up the nerve to walk alone through North Beach (99).
I thought The Dead were maybe an occult group that scavenged shallow graves, looking for dybbuks, since Audrey's friends liked to say that, at thirteen, they had lived and loved and now were ready to die. They'd gone out in the world and found it a waste, whereas I was still trying to build up the nerve to walk alone through North Beach (99).
April 14, 2013
I really did not like this book, something I rarely say. I picked it up at the library after reading and enjoying Shields' book of essays: How Literature Changed My Life. Dead Languages is supposed to be semi-autobiographical, about a boy struggling with stuttering. I did not like the words, the plot, the characters. I was really turned off by the two chapters about pimples, which I skipped over, like much of the last half of the book. I just couldn't wait to be done with the book and I didn't care how it ended. One review compared Dead Languages to Catcher in the Rye; no in my opinion. In spite of himself, I liked Holden Caulfield, can't say the same about Jeremy Zorn.
November 24, 2010
I enjoyed this book until the last 50 pages when I was rush reading it in time for Book Club meeting....I don't think it is something I'd read again. It had some very funny parts. Unfortunately, the Author reminded me of one of my English Professors at BSU (overeducated, enjoys the belittlement of others, ...maybe I'm wrong and just too damn judgemental).... Best part of the book I thought was getting to see the inside world of a stutterer....Glad I read it but wouldn't have a hard time giving my copy away (and I have a hard time letting go of my books).
June 5, 2008
Another find from my book sale shelves. I bought it because I teach/have taught English as a Second Language and always enjoy reading about language and words. My attention dropped in the last 40 pages and when the main character, Jeremy, became an 'author within the book."
For anyone who knows a stutterer this might be an interesting read...but it's not a scientific treatise. It's fiction.
For anyone who knows a stutterer this might be an interesting read...but it's not a scientific treatise. It's fiction.
November 1, 2013
I couldn't help but read this as a thinly-veiled memoir and perhaps it is. Whatever 'real genre' it belongs to, it is an especially good book for perhaps gaining more perspective on the world of speech disability/stuttering.
February 5, 2015
Incredible writing with deep language forms and usage. I understood the pain and confusion as I had a son with similar challenges. It made me laugh out loud plenty of times in such surprising ways. Enjoy!
Read
January 2, 2008hmmm...I could not engage with the characters at all. Every time I picked the book up again I could not remember what I had read before. The main characters are all annoying.
May 1, 2008
Though this book is about a boy with a stutter, his story of growing pains seemed pretty universal & relevant.
June 20, 2013
I didn't like this book, and I didn't finish it. Sorry Meera.
January 5, 2015
Finally finished this book. What a drag. I literally had to skip through the last pages to get it over with.
tasted
August 22, 2015Although Shields is an excellent writer, his story of the often superheroic life of a Jewish boy with a stutter just wasn't enough to keep me going.
January 11, 2017
I remember liking David Shields' writing very much and this story quite a bit... enough to seek out his other book "Enough about me" fairly soon afterward.
11 Jan 2017
11 Jan 2017
April 4, 2009
Really good. Funny and sad and gross and beautiful.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews