The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Proof that brevity isn’t always the soul of wit
Lydia Davis’s super-short stories read like odd, mirthless jokes
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Lydia Davis did not invent flash or supershort fiction; think of that one-line story sometimes attributed to Hemingway: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” But she has, in recent years, become its most successful and prominent practitioner. Her work often plays with the line between poetry and fiction, though maybe even talking of that line gives too much importance to the distinction. Like poems, her stories sometimes stick to a single image, or observation, or turn of phrase, and they don’t try to connect it to anything else or dress it up as something bigger than it is. But nor does she really make use of poetry’s lyric “I”, which can turn a series of small moments into what Goethe called “fragments of a great confession”. Her thermostat is set deliberately to room temperature.
Her new collection, Our Strangers, her first in almost a decade, has echoes of the encyclopaedic American poet Carl Sandburg: she has Sandburg’s appetite for quirky lists and, like him, a fond, sharp ear for overheard speech. An old woman goes shopping for “a canned ham” on the day before Thanksgiving. A husband complains to his wife that he can’t understand what she’s saying. “You’re like that ‘insurance document’,” he tells her. One of the longer stories, “Pardon the Intrusion”, riffs on the idea of “for sale” notices but cuts the sentimentality of those baby shoes with the oddness of modern life: “For sale: Audio-Technica unidirectional moving coil dynamic microphone in original box, plus stand.”
The danger with this kind of writing is that it can taste too strongly of its literary intentions. One of the longer stories describes a trip that the writer, or some other narrative “I”, took to Salzburg, where she, or they, ran into the same woman twice in one day at different restaurants. Oddly enough, the bill for each meal was exactly the same. “This was a simple story, and perhaps pointless.” But it’s framed by accounts of different acts of reading, and you have the feeling that somewhere, somehow, a theory is being sold to you. In “Addie and the Chili”, another longer story about an argument between friends after a movie, Davis makes that theory explicit: “I see why the story was difficult to write – most of all because, as is true of many stories in real life, not much had happened. All that had happened was that certain emotions had shifted around from person to person over that hour or so.”
“Addie and the Chili” is very well observed, and neatly analysed, but you can’t help feeling that this kind of incident would only deepen if you put the people involved in a more traditional narrative, where we could learn more about them. Our Strangers’ quirky presentation sometimes hides the fact that the stories themselves are fairly uneven (there are more than 150 in the book). Some read too much like jokes that aren’t meant to be funny. The overall effect can become a kind of cumulative slightness.
Yet that slightness does allow Davis to record details and emotions without any of the falsification that can be forced on you by the traditional narrative devices of context and plot. Part of her point is to show what ordinary life is actually like without the big claims that literature wants to make for it. One of the best stories in Our Strangers takes the form of a long letter from a mother to her grown-up children, about a moderately successful holiday with their father in the Texas hill country, from which she has just come back. It’s boring and detailed and they had a pretty good time. “I know this isn’t too fascinating, but it’s our life.” If you were her child, you would think: “I’m glad it went OK – I’m glad they got back safe.” It’s less clear what you’re supposed to make of it as one of her “strangers”, the reader; but maybe we can learn something about what matters by putting ourselves in the kids’ shoes.