ABOUT THE BOOK

The story of a boy who stutters, at war with, yet entranced by, language, Shields's second novel is a bitingly funny cry from the heart and a mordant paean to the power of words. “Sometimes my childhood seems . . . an endless series of . . . overwrought attempts to get beyond a voice that bothered me,” says Jeremy Zorn, victim of a speech defect that becomes his life's animating principle. Snared by sibilants, reduced to social helplessness, like a modern-day Demosthenes he resolves to use language to “rearrange the world.” His handicap comes to seem emblematic of obstacles to communication in general, and helpful in dramatizing them: “I thought it was my duty to insert into every conversation the image of its own absurdity,” Jeremy contends, and his coming-of-age requires a comprehensive survey of the available means of verbal rebellion. They include ghetto slang; sign language; singing in the school chorus; debating; and Latin (which “existed only on the page. . . . was always silent”). However, Jeremy's fitting, final choice of existential weapon is fiction. Shields flexes substantial intellectual muscle, yet powerfully sympathetic portraits of Jeremy, his family and their friends also account for the novel’s vitality; all and sundry invite effervescently sarcastic comment from the stutterer. The frustration bred by his “neurasthenic self-consciousness” commands Jeremy to let off steam of a high order of hilarity, while driving him to search for his place in the world with uncommon, compelling ferocity.

“… as touching and funny a rendering of adolescence as The Catcher in the Rye. Dead Languages speaks to everyone who has ever struggled to articulate an emotion and failed to find the words. From Billy Budd to Billy Bibbitt, characters tormented by stuttering and thus and thus prevented from expressing their most passionate feelings have played a central role m American literature. But Jeremy Zorn is the first such character to narrate his own story.”—Frank Pisano, Library Journal


FOR DISCUSSION

1. “The past is but prologue.” Return to the last paragraph of chapter one and reconsider this line. How did you respond the first time you read the paragraph? What do you think of it now, after learning more about Jeremy and his speech and his relationship to his mother?

2. How does the relationship between Jeremy’s parents shape Jeremy? To what extent does it “explain” his stuttering?

3. In what ways is Jeremy’s relationship with Audrey similar to his relationship with his mother, and in what ways does it differ? How does the following statement from Jeremy’s highlight that comparison?: “Nothing ever changes for anybody. The love that last the longest is the love that is never returned.”

4. Consider what happens to Jeremy after the book ends. Does he come inside and get warm?

5. In what ways does Dead Languages use humor to deepen and deflect the truth of stuttering?

6. Should we consider Jeremy’s stutter his own unique failure to communicate, or does it carry wider implications for the difficulty of all people to communicate?

7. Re-read the passage on pages 218-219 about Gretchen. What are we meant to take away from the following lines? “Finally, from me, silence, then my tired tongue rolled back into my mouth. It seemed like about time for someone to do something. She covered my lips with hers.”

8. What does Jeremy really want to tell his mother?

9. After Jeremy visits his father at Montbel, he leaves his father behind and refuses to take him home. Is this, as he says, the worst thing he’s done in his life? Is there another way to view his decision?

10. Talking about his mother, Jeremy says, “We loved her from afar.” Is this possible?

11. Shields uses elements of his own life to inform Dead Languages, including stuttering and his mother’s death.. How does this deepen the book’s meaning? Are we meant to read it as “fiction”? Does it matter?

12. Playing sports is central to Jeremy’s life until he breaks his leg. How does this injury affect his obsession with language?

13. Compare Jeremy’s athleticism with his father’s. What does it reveal about the two characters? Do sports help form a bond between father and son?

14. Both of Jeremy’s parents are also obsessed with language and using language to fight injustice; in what ways does this inform Jeremy’s use of language? Is there a sense in which every major character in the book suffers from his or her own “dead language”? If so, how so?

15. Throughout Dead Languages, what is the difference between Jeremy’s spoken words and his written words? How does the voice of the book—Jeremy’s first-person narration—a reflection of and transformation of his stutter?

16. Is there a turning point in the book? If so, what is it?

17. The threat of suicide, or potential suicide or thwarted suicide, runs throughout the novel Jeremy himself, Jeremy’s father, and to an extent, Jeremy’s mother all flirt with the notion. What do you make of this shared obsession? How is it related to the book’s major theme of language and communication?

18. Before reading Dead Languages, had you ever read any of David Shields’s other work? Do you see any overlapping themes or motifs?

19. Has the novel affected your opinion of stutterers and stuttering? Have you had problems with a stutter, or known others with a stutter?

20. Does David Shields intend for us to feel sympathy for Jeremy’s unique problem as a stutterer, or is Jeremy meant to be only an extreme example of the ways in which people fail to converse with each other?