The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis is hard to ignore with its bright orange cover, and it was particularly hard for me to ignore since I had never even heard of her before while her stories had already been collected and bound for sale. I took the chance on Lydia Davis after reading a New York Times Book Review on The Collected Stories:
Years before National Public Radio elevated flash fiction into contest fodder for the terminally distracted, Lydia Davis was batting out stories the length of an earthworm. But size matters less to Davis than timbre: these 198 stories, brought together from four previously published volumes, present 198 divergent voices to taunt the complacent reader. Davis nervily inhabits obsessive and haunted personas, her intonation shifting with unsettling precision from the sly to the sinister. She nabs the chilling poise of a pedant whose dispassionate analysis chokes the life out of schoolchildren’s get-well notes to a classmate; the ennui of a stay-at-home mom startled to learn that Glenn Gould shared her ardor for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”; the angst of Franz Kafka as he dithers over whether to fix his date beet or potato salad. Davis approaches the short-story form with jazzy experimentation, tinkering with lists, circumlocutions, even interviews where the questions have been creepily edited out. You don’t work your way across this mesa-sized collection so much as pogo-stick about, plunging in wherever the springs meet the page. Amid such an abundance, it would be folly to play favorites. In the absence of better sense, special pleas go out for the persnickety nattering of “Old Mother and the Grouch,” the hate-thy-neighbor paranoia of “The House Behind” and the rueful introspection of the woman who stink-bombs a family outing in “Our Trip.”
What do I have to say about the stories of Lydia Davis? I don’t think I quite know yet. I do know that once I started reading them I could not stop. It’s the best bed-time reading ever because I can make it through a short story of a few sentences before I fall asleep. Take the two sentences of “Odd Behavior” as an example:
You see how circumstances are to blame. I am not really an odd person if I put more and more small pieces of shredded Kleenex in my ears and tie a scarf around my head: when I lived alone I had all the silence I needed.
(We might all feel like stuffing our own ears with Kleenex and tying scarves around our heads after the holidays.)
As I have given up on describing Lydia Davis, I appreciate the good work of Zach Baron of The Village Voice:
Collected Stories has a lot of this type of philosophical churning, much of it revelatory and even more of it, probably, inconclusive. You do not read Lydia Davis in the hopes of finding someone like, say, Mrs. D, the writer-protagonist of Davis’s caustic “Mrs. D and Her Maids,” whose “approach to writing is practical” and in whose stories a change inevitably takes place, usually followed closely by an epiphany. You read Lydia Davis to watch a writer patiently divide the space between epiphany and actual human beings by first halves, then quarters, then eighths, and then sixteenths, into infinity.
Style is character, Joan Didion once observed. And over eight austere books—including the story collections compiled here, Break It Down (1986), Almost No Memory (1997), Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2001), Varieties of Disturbance (2007), and one novel, The End of the Story (1995)—Davis’s prose has been unmatched in mirroring the workings of the mind. Few are better than this writer at representing thought on the page; she captures not just the peculiar rhythm of internal speech but also its cycling, digressive mechanics. Here’s one character, waiting for a phone call from a lover: “When he calls me either he will then come to me, or he will not and I will be angry, and so I will have either him or my own anger, and this might be all right, since anger is always a great comfort, as I found with my husband.”
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