|
Acclaimed
author Lydia Davis is famously known for her brevity. Many
of her stories, often one to two lines long, straddle the
fence between flash fiction and poetry. Like a poet, many
of her shorter stories pack so much evocative imagery into
their few sentences that any more would seem superfluous and
wrong. Unfortunately, the reader will find very little of
this genius in her new collection, Varieties of Disturbance.
Many of the short short stories in this collection seem more
like lackluster Demetri Martin or Steven Wright routines—one
or two line observations that are mildly amusing at best.
Unlike her previous collections, these extremely short stories
lack substance and have nothing beyond what they present on
the page.
In this
collection, Davis is more successful with some of the longer
short stories. "Kafka Cooks Dinner" is a lovely etude on the
famous polarities and neuroses of the famous writer, in which
Davis excels in capturing the rhythm and emotional discomfort
found in so many Kafka stories: "The night of the dinner,
I told myself that if she did not come, I would enjoy the
empty apartment, for if being alone in a room is necessary
for life itself, being alone in an apartment is necessary
if one is to be happy. But I had not been enjoying the happiness
of the empty apartment." After the guest shows ups, the anxiety
continues: "Despite our discomfort we proceeded with our dinner.
As I gazed at the finished dish I lamented my waning strength,
I lamented being born, I lamented the light of the sun. We
ate something which unfortunately would not disappear from
our plates unless we swallowed it."
In "The
Walk," Davis tells the story of a Marcel Proust translator
walking around Oxford, England with a critic. One imagines
this must be inspired by real events—Davis recently translated
Proust's Swann's Way from In Search of Lost Time.
Like Proust, Davis enthralls the reader with the minutiae
of the walk and the conversation, and even the translator's
own thoughts on the section of the book she's working on.
But where Proust was often recording the outer world, Davis
chronicles the interior one. When ruminating on passing the
house of Charles Murray, the editor of The Oxford English
Dictionary, she writes:
When
she had arrived in this town the day before, her strongest
desire had been to see, not the more famous sights, but
the house in which this editor had lived while doing the
better part of his work, a personal account of which she
had read by his granddaughter. She had taken pains to ask
each person she met if he or she knew where this house might
be. No one had been able to tell her, and as she ran out
of time, she had given up the idea of finding it.
Some
of the longer stories are as unsuccessful as the short ones,
and sadly go on too long, but at least the short ones are
short. "We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class
of Fourth Graders"—a rumination on letters written by
children to a classmate in the hospital—reveals very
little and barely humors the reader, who is forced to endure
page after page of tedious pseudo-intellectual analysis of
school children's letters, as if the letters are important
and meaningful correspondence calling for study. Surely we've
seen this sort of treatment before—the overblown analysis
of the mundane for humorous purpose—just look at any
fanzine from the 1990's. "Mrs. D and Her Maids," which seems
to be an imagining of what Davis's life would be like if she
lived in the early twentieth century, has some gently amusing
moments, but more often, the story comes off as the whining
of a privileged woman complaining about the hired help.
Davis
has written much better books than this, and collections like
Samuel Johnson is Indignant and Almost No Memory
cover pretty much the same territory—the shrewd, barbed,
elegant and pithy short-short—and in much better fashion.
Perhaps her style was ruined by the years she spent translating
Proust. Hopefully, the smart, witty, insightful Davis will
return soon.
(August,
2007)
|
