Shields really stirs it up! So, poems and plays aside (see other comment), any straightforward narratives with descriptions of, say, planes crashing into buildings or hurricanes flattening cities are gap-fills or manipulative fakes to shrug our shoulders at? I'm reminded of JS Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Tacked onto the end of a realistic story are a series of photos of a Twin Tower with a plane emerging backward from it, making it whole. Novel as flip-book. Is this solution or gimmick? Roth, realistic to the bone, predicts that in fifty years no one will be reading long-form fiction. I guess it will be all little Shieldian snippets. Don't show his book to a novelist who has a sharp object by his desk!