Review by New York Times Review
Some writers have the uncanny ability to slant your experiences. Read enough Lydia Davis and her stories start happening to you. The other day I went to pick up some shirts at the dry cleaners. I was about to enter the shop when I heard the owners, a husband and wife, arguing, loudly. I hesitated. Do I wait and let them finish? And what about the shirts? Their retrieval was going to be complicated because I had lost my little slip, and these two obviously had more on their minds than my laundry. At the last possible second I shoved my hand in my pocket, about-faced to the sidewalk and pretended to answer my phone. The cook from the pizza place, hearing the racket next door (at this point the fight was becoming operatic), popped his head out to see what was up. Somehow he knew I was faking the call. We exchanged shrugs: What are you going to do? It was all there, the gamut. The vast and goofy weirdness of simply being alive together on the street. The helplessness, the wonder. I wanted to hug that cook, and I don't think I'm out of line to suggest he wanted to hug me, too. It's true that this incident at the dry cleaners would have happened to me had I not been immersed in Davis's new book, "Can't and Won't," but I wouldn't have experienced it in the same way. Her stories have a way of affecting the senses so that indecision itself becomes drama and a mutual shrug between two strangers can take on more meaning. This is what the best and most original literature can do: make us more acutely aware of life on and off the page. To read Davis is to become a co-conspirator in her way of existing in the world, perplexity combined with vivid observation. Our most routine habits can suddenly feel radically new. In a story called "The Moon," a character wakes up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and imagines receiving an assist from a higher power with a sense of humor: "There is a full moon far above, overhead. Its beam is coming in through the window and falling directly on the toilet seat, as if sent by a helpful God." I've been thinking a lot lately about what gives Davis's stories such strange and, at times, startling force. Her work, which often consists of brief stories made up of seemingly mundane observations, resists classification and is especially immune to explanatory jibber-jabber. In a universe drowning in words, Davis is a respite. What she doesn't say is as important as what she does. Here is the entire text of a story called "Housekeeping Observation": Under all this dirt the floor is really very clean. I read this and I imagine a character, the sort of person who would think it up. I see an entire scene, a cluttered kitchen, a filthy floor and a lone individual standing with a triumphantly useless mop planted like a flag on the linoleum. Others might blow by it and say, well O.K., nice couple of lines, but they aren't, you know, a story. A story has to have such and such elements, you know, to be a story. In the name of purity, literary police officers may relegate this very short piece and other one- or two- or three-page stories scattered throughout "Can't and Won't" to something less than stories, call them short-shorts or micro-fiction, or something known as "flash," or any of the other labels meant to reinvent what has long been invented. The wonderful thing about narrative is how elastic and wildly various it can be, and very short stories have been around since any other sort of story. In my copy of the Old Testament, God pulls off Adam and Eve in under a page. Not a piece of ephemera. What I've always appreciated about Davis is that she ignores any and all cramped notions about what is and is not a story, and her work has always freed up readers to conjure their own lasting, offbeat visions. Is this small kitchen surrender a masterpiece? No, and it's not meant to be. "Housekeeping Observation" exists alongside stories that have far more emotional impact because this collection is as mercifully flawed and awkward as her characters themselves. Call Lydia Davis the patron saint of befuddled reality. In the same book is "The Seals," a story so grief-soaked you want to look away but can't. It's about the death of a sister, and it ranks with the finest stories she's written, up there with "A Few Things Wrong With Me" or "Kafka Cooks Dinner." In "The Seals" the loss is giant, incalculable, unspeakable. There is nothing nuanced about it. Davis goes longer here, and the effect is all the more moving because she needs words to say what she knows they can't. Silence isn't an option. There are times when only words imperfect, often even hollow can do anything at all to ease the emptiness. On a train to Philadelphia, the narrator talks to herself, gropes for some way to articulate the fact that her sister is gone, period, gone. How do we endure these losses, every day, these losses? Through the very words that will always fail us: "Maybe you miss someone even more when you can't figure out what your relationship was. Or when it seemed unfinished. When I was little, I thought I loved her more than our mother. Then she left home." Davis's books more fully mirror (and refract) the chaos of existence than safer, duller, more homogeneous collections precisely because the stories aren't consistent in tone, subject matter, length, depth or anything else. Neither are we consistent. One moment you can't decide where to sit on the train, the next you find yourself staring squarely into the abyss. What Davis is attempting to express is the wild divergence of human experience, how the ordinary and the profound not only coexist but depend on each other. Thus a memory of a beloved sister falling asleep in front of the TV, the lamplight on her hair, cuts to the soul. Sixty years ago Eudora Welty wrote in these pages of J. D. Salinger's "uneven" book "Nine Stories" that "no writer worth his salt is even, or can be." "Can't and Won't" is a more mournful and somber book than previous Davis collections. Calamity and ruin are always close at hand. Characters are always prepared, no matter how much good fortune, to be hit by a bus tomorrow. There is a wrenching story about a dog returned to the pound by its owners: "They took it into the euthanizing room to be euthanized. . . . They gave it a shot. They let it stay where it fell, and went off to get another dog." Still, the wonky comedy remains, as does the knife-thrust prose, as does the exuberant invention. For instance, there's a story made out of an email from a hopeful Russian bride-to-be: I am writing this mail to you with heavy tears in my eyes and great sorrow in my heart. Come to my page. Random beauty, too, is everywhere. There are delicious frozen peas, group yard sales, bad novels you read anyway, favorite roosters, pharmacists, stolen salamis, Cumberland Farms and someone's mother in a nursing home announcing: "I'm the last of the Mohicans as they say." It is as if Davis means to remind us that only close, intense observation can save us, and this only for the time being. But what choice? In one of a series of remarkable stories taken from Gustave Flaubert's letters, Flaubert is on his way to the dentist and pauses to remember a spot where, as a child, he witnessed the aftermath of an execution. You've got your teeth pullings and you've got your beheadings, all in a morning's walk. "I saw fresh blood on the paving stones. They were carrying away the basket." Again as on my trip to the dry cleaners and as in all of Lydia Davis's inimitable work the common and the fathomless appear together on the same street.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 6, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
The title story in Davis' latest collection of nimble and caustic stories, a wry tale about why a writer was denied a prize, is two sentences in length, but, as always with this master of distillation, it conveys volumes. In the wake of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (2009) and receiving the Man Booker International Prize, Davis presents delectably intriguing and affecting new works shaped by her devotion to language, vigilant observations, literary erudition, and tart humor. A number of strikingly enigmatic stories carry the tag dream, and they are, in fact, based on dreams dreamed by Davis and her family and friends. Thirteen intricately layered and thorny pieces flagged as stories from Flaubert improvise saucily and revealingly on the seminal writer's letters. Elsewhere, Davis tosses together the trivial and the profound in hilarious and plangent tales about painful memories and epic indecision, deftly capturing the mind's perpetual churning and the terrible arbitrariness of life. Then, amid all this fretfulness and angst, a narrator devotes herself to watching three serene cows in a neighboring field. Davis is resplendent.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
With her fifth collection, Davis (Break It Down) continues to hone her subtle and distinctive brand of storytelling. These poems, vignettes, thoughts, observations, and stories defy clear categorization; each one is an independent whole, but read together they strike a fine rhythm. Davis circles the same central point in each entry: her characters examine the world with a detached, self-contained logic that seems to represent the process of writing itself. Some of the best pieces in the collection are the shortest, like "Brief Incident in Short a, Long a, and Schwa," which ends: "Ant backtracks fast-straight at cat. Cat, alarmed, backs away. Man, standing, staring, laughs. Ant changes path again. Cat, calm again, watches again." Others dwell longer on their subjects, such as "The Cows," which depicts the movements and relationships of members of a herd, as seen from the window of a countryside home, or the memories of a woman whose older half-sister has recently died in "The Seals." Several stories, set in 19th-century France, begin with "story from Flaubert," and go on to tell of Provencal kitchens, fairs, and executions. There are also disgruntled letters addressed to a frozen pea manufacturer, an Alumni review, and a peppermint candy company. These repetitions give the collection a cadence, and Davis's bulletproof prose sends each story shooting off the page. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The stories in Davis's new collection range from a single sentence to over 20 pages, composed of fragments, observations, correspondences, and traditional narratives. More than a dozen pieces are created from letters by Gustave Flaubert. At times the effect is of a writer experimenting and sharing her notebook. Yet the pieces are often affecting. Most interesting are the epistles, usually sent in the form of a complaint but wandering enough to offer real insight into the author of the missive, as when a woman explains that though she is grateful to receive a grant she is disappointed that it didn't free her from the agony of having to teach writing. Even an extended story that observes the behavior of cows has the power to draw the reader in, as does a list of the words that seem to be said by household appliances. The most moving piece is about the narrator's grief over her sister's death. VERDICT Davis, whose Varieties of Disturbance was a 2007 National Book Award finalist, is inventive and original. Recommended for fans of the short story and of "flash fiction." [See Prepub Alert, 10/21/13.]-Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Five years after a mammoth, comprehensive collection of stories secured her literary legacy, this unique author explores new directions and blurs boundaries in writing that is always fresh and often funny. For one of the country's most critically acclaimed writers (The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, 2009), a new collection is like a box of chocolates, one in whichas she writes in "A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates"a single piece can be "very good, rich and bitter, sweet and strange at the same time" and can feed "a vague, indefinite hunger, not necessarily for food." As previously, her shortest storiesa single sentence or paragraph, well less than a pagecould often pass as the prose equivalent of a haiku or Zen koan, and elements such as character development, or even characters, are often conspicuous in their absence. The narrative voice has a consistency of tone throughout much of the collection: conversational, intelligent, by no means opaque or impenetrable like much postmodern fiction. It flows easily from dreams to conscious reflection, often about words themselves or "Writing" (the title of one very short story) or reading, ruminations that may or may not be the author's own. As the relationship between writer and reader becomes more familiar, one gets a sense of a narrative character and of what's important to that character (grammar, concision, precision) and how she spends her time (in academe, on various modes of transportation, among animals in the country). Some stories are based on the letters of Flaubert (whom Davis has translated, along with Proust and others), while others are unsigned (and unsent?) letters to various companies and boards, comments and complaints that often themselves turn into stories. In "Not Interested," the narrator explains, "I'm not interested in reading this book. I was not interested in reading the last one I tried, either....The books I'm talking about are supposed to be reasonably good, but they simply don't interest me....These days, I prefer books that contain something real, or something the author at least believed to be real. I don't want to be bored by someone else's imagination." Whether fiction or non, Davis never bores.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
