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Back
in 2003, a friend from Little, Brown sent me a package of
three paperback books they had just published—The
Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, Hell, and Versailles,
all by Kathryn Davis. I may have heard the name before. These
three books had previously been released in hardcover—Girl
way back in 1993, Hell in 1998, and Versailles
just a year earlier in 2002. All of these books were well-reviewed
but poorly promoted. I never saw them at the front of the
bookstore, and my friends and Amazon never recommended any
to me, so I never picked any up. Her name didn't stick in
my head. For whatever reason, the publishers of these books
chose not to release her books in paperback. "It was an annoying
mystery at the time," said Davis in an interview with Bookslut.
But here they were, just handed to me, so why not read?
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Photo
by Emma Dodge Hanson
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I decided
to try Versailles first—it was the shortest of
the three, and I wasn't sure how much I wanted to commit to
Davis. Versailles was touted as a stream-of-consciousness
first-person narrative by Marie Antoinette. I wasn't particularly
interested in Marie Antoinette, but I like experimental fiction,
so it seemed like a good place to start. I was absolutely
floored. Davis adeptly swept me into the head of the 14-year-old
princess, her flighty moods and her sorrow and excitement
at leaving Austria to become the bride of French king Louis
XVI. The book starts, "My soul is going on a trip. I want
to talk about her. I want to talk about her. Why would anyone
ever want to talk about anything else?"
As Marie
matures, the prose changes, becomes more introspective. She
laments a notoriously poor decision: "And on that May morning
when a crowd of peasants poured through the gates at Place
d'Armes, filling the Forward Court with their furious voices
and pale upturned faces, with their rumbling stomachs and
loaves of moldy bread, who knows why I didn't see among them
the invisible hand of the future, wielding a bloody knife?"
In Versailles, Marie Antoinette becomes a real person—maybe
not the person she actually was, but a real person nonetheless.
I eagerly
jumped into Hell, a book I was told was "difficult."
Hell is a meditation on shelter, sustenance, and decay,
told through three interwoven narratives: one of a Nineteenth
Century expert on housekeeping, one of Napoleon's chef, and
one of a family in a 1950s Philadelphia suburb. Davis uses
evocative phrases to create an uneasy tension. Even the innocuous
act of grinding meat takes an ominous turn in Hell:
 "The
mother's only making three hamburgers, because the older of
her two daughters (in bed reading Wuthering Heights,
not a wink of light coming through the venetian blinds) has
refused to eat much of anything ever since she watched hamburger
fall in worms from the grinder at Caruso's Market." When the
dachshund is described as "lying in a pool of blackish…" my
mind immediately assumed the next word would be "blood" before
I read "green shade under the dogwood tree."
The
Girl Who Trod on a Loaf was the largest of the three,
and it's about an elderly composer, which is why I left it
for last. I admit, I can occasionally be a bit plebeian in
my tastes, and I prefer to read books about people like me—slackers,
punk rock chicks, trailer trash. But I figured at most I'd
be wasting two subway trips on this book if indeed I didn't
like it. Of course, it's spectacular.
Girl,
it turns out, is about two women who live in a trailer park
in upstate New York—a waitressing single mother named
Frances Thorn, and her neighbor, elderly Danish composer Helle
Ten Brix, who is working on what will be her final opera,
based on the Hans Christian Andersen story "The Girl Who
Trod on a Loaf." The Andersen story is about a girl who
wastes a loaf of bread by using it as a stepping stone so
she doesn't get her shoes muddy. As she steps on the loaf,
it sinks into the mud, going deeper and deeper until the mud
swallows the girl. She is sucked into a hellish realm and
turned into a statue, though she later has the opportunity
to redeem herself. In Girl, the women form a friendship
over music—Frances is a former Juilliard student whose
life got sidetracked. Helle's story, which Frances tries to
reconstruct after Helle's death, takes elements from folk
and fairy tales. For example, as a child she tries to poison
her evil stepmother. But, just like the Andersen story, Helle
gives Frances an opportunity for redemption by allowing her
to reclaim her musical heritage. She leaves Frances the opera
she is working on, intending for Frances to finish it. Girl
is as eerie and creepy as Davis's other novels, but with a
sweeter touch.
 In
2006, Little, Brown released what is probably Davis's most
acclaimed book, The Thin Place, an intricately layered
and weird novel. Again, eeriness permeates everything. In
an upstate New York town on the edge of the Canadian border,
a young girl can raise the dead, a town historian studies
a local Nineteenth Century tragedy known as the Sunday School
Outing Disaster, and a mysterious stranger moves to town.
Davis's sweeping omniscient narrative offers readers not only
the thoughts of people, but the thoughts of dogs, cats, beavers,
and even lichen. The thin place of the title refers to a place
where the natural and supernatural worlds collide, emphasizing
the mystical and cryptic nature of the book. In Davis's hands,
the border between the worldly and otherworldly is malleable,
and this exquisite book is as ecstatic as any hagiography.
So why
don't more people read Davis? Why is she not discussed in
the same reverent, hushed tones as Don DeLillo, David Foster
Wallace, William T. Vollmann? I suspect it's because she is
a woman who writes almost exclusively about women, and she
tackles big existential issues by placing them in small places.
The big movements in Davis's books are overshadowed by the
small things that lead up to them. People are not addicted
to drugs, smuggling dangerous cargo, jumping off buildings.
Why is she not as popular as Joyce Carol Oates, Anne Tyler,
Alice Hoffman? Unlike those writers, Davis's work is slightly
experimental. It takes some work to read her books, but the
books are well worth the effort.
I still
have two more Davis books to read before she release her next
novel—Labrador and The Walking Tour. I
expect to be wowed.
(January,
2008)
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