Varieties of Disturbance: Stories [Paperback]

Anyone glancing through this book who thinks "well, gee, I could just write a bunch of one-line stories or prose poems and be as smart as Lydia Davis" will find, if they actually attempt this project, that only Lydia Davis is as smart as Lydia Davis. Whether you read at random or in sequence, you will find your assumptions about fiction, story, and point-of-view seriously and subtly challenged by every piece in this collection. The shorter (as short as one line or indeed sentence fragments) pieces challenge the reader to interrogate the ample blank space for context and, of course, find none. On every page, the stylish ways Davis violates narrative conventions of form and substance just whets the craving for more of her relentlessly sharp, witty, varied prose. How can stories ostensibly structured as an anthropological or linguistic studies (or even a mess of notes) give us such heart-breaking insight into the vivid lives of characters who, in terms of the 'story,' are not even characters at all, but merely subjects? How can a non-story (two conference goers idly sharing a pleasant mental and physical ramble through history and literature) where nothing happens, nothing changes, and nothing is achieved inform us, so startlingly, about what a story actually *is*? Thank goodness people are still writing books that demand a reader actually exert the mental activity to *read*, and not just glance over words on a page.

Lydia Davis has earned accolades from many of our more jaded critics for the originality of her experimental fiction, particularly for her "very short stories." I'll be honest: while I can see the appeal for some readers, especially for those who complain about the alleged sameness of modern literary fiction, most of her prose isn't to my taste. My problem with Davis's type of "experimental" fiction is that, several months having passed since I finished reading this collection, I can recall very little of it other than the banal preciousness of a few selections and the Gertrude Stein-like repetitiveness of its curlicued passages. Although a few of the pieces might resemble Robert Walser's modernist feuilletons in their meandering detail, they lack his Thoreauvian attention to landscape and atmosphere.

The selection I remember most is "The Walk," and it's one of the few stories to let slip anything approaching emotion: resentment, sadness, and perhaps a little resignation. There is a story behind this story; it is a "fictional" response to Andre Aciman's review throttling Davis's translation of "Swann's Way": "Gone not just the style," he had written in his review, "but the voice, which is the temper, the attitude, the inflection of style." (I, by the way, don't quite agree with Aciman here: I found her translation both faithful to the text and enchanting in tone.) In her story, she imagines--or re-imagines--an encounter with her critic at a conference on translation; "He felt that she kept too close to the original text" is her acerbic summary. She closes the piece with her solitude after everyone has left, "disappointed that some of the other participants had not stayed on afterward for a least a little while." The reader unaware of this parochial controversy, however, will probably be at a loss to tease out the strands of the story.

Some of the other longer pieces do rise to the level of parody. "Helen and Vi: A Study in Health and Vitality" is a satirical look at an academic case study of two women. It begins by describing the two subjects and how they've lived notably long lives, but a third women, omitted from the "final" draft of the study yet refuting its conclusions, keeps showing up in the text, butting in uninvited in italics. It's actually rather clever and witty, although it goes on a bit too long. Similar, but more successful, is "We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth-Graders," which masks as a painstaking sociological analysis of the content and "letter-writing skills" of its imagined subjects. The story's real "character" is, of course, neither the group of children nor the collection of letters but the obsessive and clownish windbag who would write such twaddle in the first place.

Davis includes a scattering of "stories" that take up a few lines on an otherwise empty page. In a recent interview she has asserted that her single-passage stories were a reaction to translating the notoriously long sentences of Proust: "it made me want to see how short a piece of fiction could be that would still have a point to it, and not just be a throwaway joke." The problem, of course, is that the results too often belie her intention, and some of these items don't even rise to the level of a joke. Thus, we have the single line of "Mother's Reaction to My Travel Plans": "Gainsville! It's too bad your cousin is dead!" (What is the "point" here? That her mother speaks in typos?) Similarly, "Insomnia," which reads, in its entirety, "My body aches so-- / It must be this heavy bed pressing up against me." An old and dull children's riddle doesn't gain in import typeset in a nice font and surrounded with an excess of white space. Similar groundbreaking profundity can be found spending a few moments on Twitter.

Short stories? You call these short stories?

Well, it doesn't really matter what you label them....They are fun,
they are innovative, they zing your mind.