BREVITY’S RAINBOW
Can’t and Won’t By Lydia Davis Farrar, Straus and Giroux 289 pp; $30
You could call Lydia Davis a great miniaturist, though that invites the question: What’s your unit of measurement? Unlike most American writers receiving international prizes, she does tend to focus on very short stories, but they might be better described as succinct, exploding the accreted clichés of literary fiction, until so much of that intricate plotting, deft characterization, etc., seems to be futile marketing copy. In this she resembles the misunderstood modernist Ronald Firbank, who laconically boasted: “I think nothing of filing 50 pages down to make a brief, crisp paragraph.” Davis’s fiction does not blithely glide over “contemporary events” or sing a threnody for the aging-yet-sexual man. She has more interesting work to do. Her Collected Stories barely exceeds 700 pages, a faint rebuke of every novel that wastes as much space. I’d trade away Philip Roth’s bibliography if you gave me “Spring Spleen” in return: “I am happy the leaves are growing large so quickly. Soon they will hide the neighbour and her screaming child.”
Her new collection Can’t and Won’t makes use of extreme brevity as well, often to bracket deadpan jokes, tight little bows that unravel in your hands. The unabridged “Bloomington” goes like this: “Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before.” Elsewhere, neat simplicity is less façade than grist. Like Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, the twin variations of “Reversible Story” become more striking for their absence of incident. “Master” comes across as both self-help and thriller, or erotica that’s mocking erotica. And “Men” demonstrates that, despite Davis’s wry restraint, her prose can still trot into flight: “Every now and then, it is true, a man rises in our midst like a pine tree, and looks savagely at us, and sends us hobbling away in great floods to hide in the caves and gullies until he is gone.”
With her longer stories, Davis works in subtler gradations. The one where a camp salonniere deplores the frightful habits of her maids is another, unexpected conjuring of Firbank, though she eschews his flamboyant language and sensual climates. Davis is more concerned with interiority, but not one recognizable as typical “novelistic” psychology. Nobody stumbles over any revelations. She revels in passing, even pedantic, thoughts, the kind most of us would feel vaguely embarrassed to record or recall. “How I Read as Quickly as Possible Through My Back Issues of the Times Literary Supplement” juxtaposes entries like: “I do not want to read about the life of Jerry Lewis”; “I do want to read about mammalian carnivores”; “Not interested in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Military History.”
A few tropes here may be exhausting themselves. Whether addressed to a candy company or a frozen peas manufacturer, Davis’s “letters of complaint” just aren’t as funny as the earlier examples. It’s a disappointment both framed and soothed by two new forms, vignettes adapted from dreams and the letters of Flaubert. Davis produced a recent edition of Madame Bovary, and these stories all translate foreign dialects in turn, whether the country is 1850s France or a friend’s subconscious. Rendered in her calm prose, dormant reveries go from strange to mundane and then strange again: “We are in a clearing at night. Along one side, four Egyptian goddesses of immense size are positioned in profile and lit from behind. Black shapes of people come into the clearing and slip across the silhouettes. A moon is pasted against the dark sky.”
In the title story, the narrator explains: “I was recently denied a writing prize because, they said, I was lazy. What they meant by lazy was that I used too many contractions: for instance, I would not write out in full the words cannot and will not, but instead contracted them to can’t and won’t.” It’s hard not to picture this they as male — one imagines the jury adding “domestic” or “selfobsessed” — and, to quote the editor Robbie Myers, “men have always confused length with quality.” You can read another slyly serrated polemic into Davis’s words, too, about the many fripperies believed integral to fiction, and how much remains untried.