We asked PEN members who or what came to mind when they heard the term "unreliable narrator." Here is one member's response.

DAVID SHIELDS: At once desperate for authenticity and in love with artifice, we know all the moments are "moments": staged and theatrical, shaped and thematized. Still, against the simulacrum of the Academy Awards ceremony, Halle Berry's crying jag was the one thing that made us cringe and the only thing we'll remember. At the Winter Olympics, the French judge's confession that she had been coerced seemed like the one sliver and shiver of reality in Salt Lake. I find I can listen to talk-radio in a way that I can't abide the network news--the sound of human voices waking before they drown. Who would not query the truth-value of the rather too conveniently "found" Osama bin Laden tape while at the same time acknowledging that it's the most compelling footage from the war in Afghanistan? "Elimidate," "Shipmates," "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?" and "The Bachelor" tell us more about the state of unions than any romantic comedy could dream of telling us. The Nanny Diaries is a success precisely because of the way in which it ambiguously straddles verifiable and imaginary facts. The appeal of Billy Collins is that, compared to the hieroglyphic obscurantism of his colleagues, his poems sound like they were tossed off in a couple of hours while he drank scotch and listened to jazz late at night (they weren't; this is an illusion). A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was full of the same self-conscious apparatus that had bored everyone silly until it got tethered to what felt like someone's life (even if the author constantly reminded us of how fictionalized that life was). The Blair Witch Project--a fictional documentary whose authenticity was documented on the web and the sequel to which was a dismal failure--is the emblematic artwork of our time.

I like work--self-reflexive documentary film such as Ross McElwee's, pseudo-confessional poetry such as Tony Hoagland's, self-consuming performance art such as Sandra Bernhard's, melancholy stand-up comedy such as Rick Reynolds'--that has the lure of the real, that seems to be gesturing toward some sort of nervous-making author-self. And yet, just as out-and-out fiction no longer compels my attention, neither does straight-ahead memoir. The moment a book can be generically located, it seems to me for all intents and purposes dead. I want the contingency of life, the unpredictability, the unknowability, the mysteriousness, and this is best conveyed when a narrative can bend at will to what it needs--fiction, fantasy, memoir, meditation, confession, reportage. Why do I so strenuously resist generic boundaries? Because when I stay within them I can't think. The moment I'm constrained within a form, my mind shuts off, in a sort of sit-down strike, saying, "This is boring, so I'm not going to try very hard." I find it very nearly impossible to read a novel that presents itself unselfconsciously as a novel, since it's not clear to me how such a book could convey what it feels like to be alive right now. Instead, it must constantly be shifting shape, redefining itself, staying open for business way past closing time. "Don't mess with Mr. In-Between," my father would often advise me, but it seems to me that Mr. In-Between is precisely where we all live now.