The collected stories of Lydia Davis

Review by New York Times Review

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."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 10, 2009]

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Review by Booklist Review

Davis' short stories burrow deep into your mind. Her narrators' voices are resigned, insistent, haunting, familiar, peculiar. Their situations, obsessions, and pursuits vary from the banal to the inexplicable. And Davis, heir to the shredding wit and poignancy of Dorothy Parker and the shrewd surrealism of Donald Barthelme, is the master of the quick switch, the sneak attack, the end run. The rich spectrum of her daring short fiction can now be fully and luxuriously appreciated in this generous collection, which unites Break It Down (1986) with Almost No Memory (1997), Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2001), and Varieties of Disturbance (2007). Davis writes with piercing exactitude about alienation, phobias, psychological paralysis, and tamped-down rage in stories that are emotionally authentic, darkly funny, and sharply beautiful. Her micro-fables (e.g., The Great-Grandmothers ) are lacerating, a tale comprising notes about Marie Curie is rife with malapropisms, and other stories read like the monologues of people profiled by neurologist Oliver Sacks. Whatever the focus, Davis' incisive, rightfully celebrated stories snap us awake with their topsy-turvy yet dead-on perspective.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Library Journal Review

This collection marks the first publication of Davis's stories in one volume, including stories from two previous collections, the acclaimed Break It Down and Varieties of Disturbance. Davis's highly original voice ranges from tweetlike one-liners with title ("Index Entry Christian, I'm not a") to longer works of several pages. Many stories are first-person accounts of the narrator analyzing, or overanalyzing, some situation he or she is encountering, as if waking from a dream. As she writes in "Story," "I try to figure it out." Davis, unlike some writers of nontraditional fiction, doesn't take "stop making sense" as her personal motto. Her art lies in getting the reader to look at everyday situations from a new and different perspective. Verdict This will be prized by those who are already fans of Davis's work and should also appeal to discerning readers of more plot-driven, conventional fiction ready for something challenging and thought-provoking.-Leslie Patterson, Brown Univ. Lib., Providence, RI (c) Copyright 2010. 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.

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THE COLLECTED STORIES OF LYDIA DAVIS Story I get home from work and there is a message from him: that he is not coming, that he is busy. He will call again. I wait to hear from him, then at nine o'clock I go to where he lives, find his car, but he's not home. I knock at his apartment door and then at all the garage doors, not knowing which garage door is his--no answer. I write a note, read it over, write a new note, and stick it in his door. At home I am restless, and all I can do, though I have a lot to do, since I'm going on a trip in the morning, is play the piano. I call again at ten forty-five and he's home, he has been to the movies with his old girlfriend, and she's still there. He says he'll call back. I wait. Finally I sit down and write in my notebook that 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. And then I go on to write, in the third person and the past tense, that clearly she always needed to have a love even if it was a complicated love. He calls back before I have time to finish writing all this down. When he calls, it is a little after eleven thirty. We argue until nearly twelve. Everything he says is a contradiction: for example, he says he did not want to see me because he wanted to work and even more because he wanted to be alone, but he has not worked and he has not been alone. There is no way I can get him to reconcile any of his contradictions, and when this conversation begins to sound too much like many I had with my husband I say goodbye and hang up. I finish writing down what I started to write down even though by now it no longer seems true that anger is any great comfort. I call him back five minutes later to tell him that I am sorry about all this arguing, and that I love him, but there is no answer. I call again five minutes later, thinking he might have walked out to his garage and walked back, but again there is no answer. I think of driving to where he lives again and looking for his garage to see if he is in there working, because he keeps his desk there and his books and that is where he goes to read and write. I am in my nightgown, it is after twelve and I have to leave the next morning at five. Even so, I get dressed and drive the mile or so to his place. I am afraid that when I get there I will see other cars by his house that I did not see earlier and that one of them will belong to his old girlfriend. When I drive down the driveway I see two cars that weren't there before, and one of them is parked as close as possible to his door, and I think that she is there. I walk around the small building to the back where his apartment is, and look in the window: the light is on, but I can't see anything clearly because of the half-closed venetian blinds and the steam on the glass. But things inside the room are not the same as they were earlier in the evening, and before there was no steam. I open the outer screen door and knock. I wait. No answer. I let the screen door fall shut and I walk away to check the row of garages. Now the door opens behind me as I am walking away and he comes out. I can't see him very well because it is dark in the narrow lane beside his door and he is wearing dark clothes and whatever light there is is behind him. He comes up to me and puts his arms around me without speaking, and I think he is not speaking not because he is feeling so much but because he is preparing what he will say. He lets go of me and walks around me and ahead of me out to where the cars are parked by the garage doors. As we walk out there he says "Look," and my name, and I am waiting for him to say that she is here and also that it's all over between us. But he doesn't, and I have the feeling he did intend to say something like that, at least say that she was here, and that he then thought better of it for some reason. Instead, he says that everything that went wrong tonight was his fault and he's sorry. He stands with his back against a garage door and his face in the light and I stand in front of him with my back to the light. At one point he hugs me so suddenly that the fire of my cigarette crumbles against the garage door behind him. I know why we're out here and not in his room, but I don't ask him until everything is all right between us. Then he says, "She wasn't here when I called you. She came back later." He says the only reason she is there is that something is troubling her and he is the only one she can talk to about it. Then he says, "You don't understand, do you?" I try to figure it out. So they went to the movies and then came back to his place and then I called and then she left and he called back and we argued and then I called back twice but he had gone out to get a beer (he says) and then I drove over and in the meantime he had returned from buying beer and she had also come back and she was in his room so we talked by the garage doors. But what is the truth? Could he and she both really have come back in that short interval between my last phone call and my arrival at his place? Or is the truth really that during his call to me she waited outside or in his garage or in her car and that he then brought her in again, and that when the phone rang with my second and third calls he let it ring without answering, because he was fed up with me and with arguing? Or is the truth that she did leave and did come back later but that he remained and let the phone ring without answering? Or did he perhaps bring her in and then go out for the beer while she waited there and listened to the phone ring? The last is the least likely. I don't believe anyway that there was any trip out for beer. The fact that he does not tell me the truth all the time makes me not sure of his truth at certain times, and then I work to figure out for myself if what he is telling me is the truth or not, and sometimes I can figure out that it's not the truth and sometimes I don't know and never know, and sometimes just because he says it to me over and over again I am convinced it is the truth because I don't believe he would repeat a lie so often. Maybe the truth does not matter, but I want to know it if only so that I can come to some conclusions about such questions as: whether he is angry at me or not; if he is, then how angry; whether he still loves her or not; if he does, then how much; whether he loves me or not; how much; how capable he is of deceiving me in the act and after the act in the telling. THE COLLECTED STORIES OF LYDIA DAVIS Copyright © 2009 by Lydia Davis Excerpted from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis by Lydia Davis All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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