A review by nick_jenkins
Can't and Won't by Lydia Davis
5.0
Davis's work reminds me somewhat of stand-up comedy (which I'm not sure I ever would have thought of if I hadn't read David Grossman's Horse Walks into a Bar earlier this year). I mean that not just in the humor of her stories, or the fact that many of them are observational in a kind of slanted or skewed way, but that the proper way to absorb them is to think of them less like independent efforts--just as I don't think stand-up is, properly speaking, just a set of discrete jokes or bits--and more like a kind of performance or routine.
Even more than in her earlier work, this performative aspect becomes clear in this volume of Davis's short stories, especially in the extraordinary centerpiece of the book, "The Letter to the Foundation," or in the later "A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates," which are largely about the writer's anxieties and aversive attachment to teaching. Teaching here figures in as a displacement of writing: the writer wants to write but must teach in order to earn money. But it is a displacement of another sort as well, because--like reading aloud, which the writer also performs in this book--it shifts the question of audience away from the moment of writing and into other literary activities. Davis also performs for us as a reader, at one point ("Not Interested") as a reader who cannot engage with the kind of books that are supposed to be intellectually enticing to her. ("Please spare me your imagination, I'm so tired of your vivid imagination, let someone else enjoy it.")
At any rate, the point--I think--is that it seems less important to read Davis's work as pure prose (although I don't think the book or an excerpt of it would necessarily make for a good monologue) in the sense that one is looking for a particular kind of pleasure in the normal prosaic units: at the sentence level or at the level of plot (contained in a single story or set of linked stories). Instead, they give pleasure in other ways: with the rhythms and dynamic shifts, the surprises and monotonies that build up when one reads a good many of these in a row. That, I think, is the best way to read them.
Even more than in her earlier work, this performative aspect becomes clear in this volume of Davis's short stories, especially in the extraordinary centerpiece of the book, "The Letter to the Foundation," or in the later "A Small Story About a Small Box of Chocolates," which are largely about the writer's anxieties and aversive attachment to teaching. Teaching here figures in as a displacement of writing: the writer wants to write but must teach in order to earn money. But it is a displacement of another sort as well, because--like reading aloud, which the writer also performs in this book--it shifts the question of audience away from the moment of writing and into other literary activities. Davis also performs for us as a reader, at one point ("Not Interested") as a reader who cannot engage with the kind of books that are supposed to be intellectually enticing to her. ("Please spare me your imagination, I'm so tired of your vivid imagination, let someone else enjoy it.")
At any rate, the point--I think--is that it seems less important to read Davis's work as pure prose (although I don't think the book or an excerpt of it would necessarily make for a good monologue) in the sense that one is looking for a particular kind of pleasure in the normal prosaic units: at the sentence level or at the level of plot (contained in a single story or set of linked stories). Instead, they give pleasure in other ways: with the rhythms and dynamic shifts, the surprises and monotonies that build up when one reads a good many of these in a row. That, I think, is the best way to read them.