Book review: The Collected Stories, Lydia Davis

Published on Tuesday 27 July 2010 17:37

Hamilton, £20

THIS is not a book to review in a week: rather, it is a book to abide with and ponder over for a lifetime. Lydia Davis is one of the most ingenious, affecting and precise writers of short fictions currently working in English. This volume, bringing together the collections Break It Down (1986), Almost No Memory (1997), Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2001) and Varieties Of Disturbance (2007), should mean that she receives the same recognition as the pantheon of names - Ali Smith, Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody, Dave Eggers - who are happy to go on the record to register their admiration for her. The "short story collection" is a problematic genre, and even when reading the greatest exponents of the form - say, Raymond Carver, Flannery O'Connor or Jorge Luis Borges - the reader swiftly becomes acclimatised to their trademark techniques and stylistic fingerprints. Reading one can be dazzling; reading a whole collection at once can be a sating experience.

Reading all four of Davis's collections back to back is quite the opposite. She induces in the reader a kind of literary vertigo: you can never tell from one story what form, what tone, what angle to expect next. It is unsettling in the best possible way. She is, by turns, oblique and outspoken, wry and naive, hilariously funny and heartbreakingly plangent; at times she is a deft surrealist (a girl turns into a tree, then into stone, but "there are limits to what you can accept, even of impossible things"), the next minute she is an acute vivisector of the most transient, everyday emotions.

It would be a tautology to observe that her short stories are not long - indeed, the pointless label "minimalist" has been bandied about by exasperated critics. The longest, 'Helen And Vi: A Study In Health And Vitality' runs to nearly 50 pages, but many more are only a few sentences long, and some are not even a sentence long.

But trying to pigeon-hole a writer according to a word count is a pointless endeavour; like thinking a glass of wine and a glass of absinthe are identical. She can suggest more incident, wit and reflection in stories like 'Lord Royston's Tour' or 'Marie Curie, So Honourable Woman' than other authors could over a brick-sized novel. Even the shortest pieces have a gnomic quality than means they reward re-reading.

Many writers have written about the gulf between individuals and the impossibility of ever really knowing what another person is thinking. Davis certainly writes in this form, and often in a genuinely moving manner. But, more interestingly, she often describes people who are alienated from their own thoughts. A story like 'Examples Of Confusion' evokes odd, twilight moments of estrangement: "Though invisible in the mirror, I see my white jacket fluttering past disembodied, moving quickly since it is late. I think how remote I am, if that is me. Then think how remote, at least, that fluttering thing is, for being me". In 'A Friend Of Mine', Davis becomes philosophical: "It occurs to me that I must not know altogether what I am, either, and that others know certain thing about me better than I do, though I think I ought to know and I proceed as if I do. Even once I see this, however, I have no choice but to continue to proceed as if I know altogether what I am, though I may also try to guess, from time to time, just what it is that others know that I do not know."

But this is not just abstruse speculation. The story creates a definite character, and Davis's skill is in conveying sinuous, almost tactile, grooves of thought.

No writer I know describes what thinking is actually like as well as Lydia Davis. Davis is also an accomplished translator - she had the unenviable role of producing the first volume of the new edition of Proust, with its notoriously intractable opening sentence - and as such, it's no surprise that language itself is often the subject of the story as well as its medium.

She can play this for comic effect, as in the macaronic 'French Lesson I: Le Meurtre'. It can be - dread word - avant-garde, as in 'Southward Bound, Reads Worstward Ho', which plots a woman's attempts to read Beckett in a van. Again, these are not dry experiments, as each piece builds an identity for the person doing the thinking.

A good example is 'Oral History (With Hiccups)', a typographically inventive piece that begins "My sister died last year leaving two dau ghters" . As the story unspools, the reader begins to piece together possible reasons why the narrator has hiccups, what it is she is struggling to keep in, or out, of the story. In the most recent collection, Davis integrates other people's words more often, framing and polishing them in surprising ways.

One story, 'The Race Of The Patient Motorcycles', might almost be a metaphor for Davis's own method. "At first it would seem easy to be the slowest of the motorcyclists, but it is not easy, because it is not in the temperament of a motorcyclist to be slow or patient", it begins; ending "to inure himself to look about at the visible world with a wonderful potential for speed between his legs, and yet to advance so slowly that any change in position is almost imperceptible, and the world, too, is unchanging".

That poise, that detail, that precarious powerful elegance is Davis's own.

Edinburgh International Book Festival, 21 August, 7.30pm; 23 August, 10.15pm

&#149 This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday, August 1, 2010