Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

Super cool, mind-flipping prose.

On a recent trip to New York City, I decided to take notice of graffiti.

As my train slowed to a stop outside of Penn Station, waiting for another train to pass, I saw illuminated briefly painted on the tunnel wall what I thought was a penguin-like bird with a hat.

My first thought was, how could someone get down here to paint that? Can anyone just enter this normally dark tunnel teeming with trains, live wires, probably police cameras, and the occasional team of workmen? Probably not, but someone obviously did. Where did they get in then? Did they hop a fence on the Upper West Side, or did they jump down from a platform and walk in? Could it be that easy? There’s graffiti everywhere in places like this, so I would guess it couldn’t be that hard. All this work to get to this bit of dank wall in a train tunnel then started making me think why? Are graffiti writers just out there looking for a blank space? Do they paint here for the benefit of other graffitists? Unless those other graffitists happen to hop the fence and walk down the tunnel, probably not. They would have to ride Amtrak. Do they want Amtrak customers to see their work? Do they expect us to understand it, or even appreciate it? My vague familiarity of graffiti felt suddenly pathetically small in a yawning, cavernous world of knowledge when I found Wikipedia’s incredibly entertaining Glossary of Graffiti. By the time I got to “T” (“Topping”: Painting directly above – but not over – someone else's work. A slightly passive-aggressive 'dis') the train had finally pulled into the station, and passengers were scrambling for their bags and a place in line in the aisle (I did the same).

Lydia Davis, I am fairly confident, would follow a similar train of thought if she also decided to notice graffiti. She might go a bit further though. She might describe how the penguin’s flippers were sharp-looking and its eyes sinister. She might identify the hat as a derby, and may even note that’s an unusual choice for a penguin. She might even question if the penguin was even a penguin. She might also speculate on the color of the penguin, when the penguin was graffiti-ed, and compare it to other graffiti around it.

The analysis would be thrilling, fun, exhaustive, and her own. She would not be concerned with her lack of knowledge of the history of street art, but would use a home-made stream-of-consciousness to pry out the details of the world passing by. She would be more concerned with the what than the why or how.

Lydia Davis is a masterful observer–one justly celebrated. If you want to hear about how good she is, the three pages of praise inserted at the beginning and one at the end are crammed with other writers and reviewers who can barely keep their pants on they’re so excited. “The best prose stylist in America,” (Rick Moody); “Davis is a magician of self-consciousness. Few writers now working make the words on the page matter more,” (Jonathan Franzen); “Sharp, deft, ironic, understated, and consistently surprising,” (Joyce Carol Oates), etc, etc. They say it better than I–but she is very good.

Her stories are at turns spooky, cozy, sexy, and funny. Always they are weird. She is impressionistic without kowtowing to an underlying call to make things beautiful. She gives deference to her low-grade anxieties and not infrequent bouts of loneliness or strife, giving a passage of what might otherwise be just clinical detail some warmth. Her collection of short stories (around 120) spanning over 20 years (Break It Down (1986); Almost No Memory (1997); Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2001); Varieties of Disturbance (2007) range in length and topic–noting the weather, parents, animal behavior, men at first impressions and after second thoughts. And although her longer pieces are brilliant, her strength lies in her brevity. Many of her stories consist of a paragraph or even a line (“Mother’s Reaction to My Travel Plans”: Gainesville! It’s too bad your cousin is dead!) Some are about living in a house, feeling its age, its rotting corners, and wild vegetation growing over the windows. Others are witty hypotheticals for specific people–some fictional, many historical– “Foucault and Pencil,” “Kafka Makes Dinner,” “Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman,” “Glenn Gould.” Many are like math problems, with strangely acrobatic prose that forces the reader to hold multiple variables as true at once and grapple through to the end. I often felt like I had solved a Rubix cube but it still looked wrong (“Southward Bound, Reads Westward Ho” for one). Although her prose can be chaotically structured, her grammar is rigorously correct, making these seemingly dashed thoughts feel strategic and controlled. (Davis also happens to have an impressive career as a translator for French literature, including Flaubert, Proust others—one likely source of her grammarly respect).

Davis’ powers extend to the subtler realm of rephrasing. Specifically of mundane moments and thoughts, odds and ends, that add up to getting older–daily things you might normally half think about but shove in the back to make way for more immediate stressors and releases. Davis’ stories, in their preternatural way, slow down and reconfigure stuff that only exists in half-remembered dreams or a long car ride without a cellphone charger. For that reason, I recommend her as good company if you are going through a deep change. I feel different from the man I was when I started—maybe the murk of nearing 40 is a little clearer.

This collection is a great one to have on your bedside table if you are an intermittent reader. They are many, but their pacing and construction are designed for specific moments of rest, when one’s attention is open for business. For me Davis’ stories are best read when most things are put to bed–and all that’s left are yellow reading lamps, dark rooms, and a stubbornly awake curiosity. There are many favorites include “Mildred and the Oboe,” “The House Plans,” “St. Martin,” “This Condition,” “Mr. Knockly,” “Old Mother and the Grouch,” “In a Northern Country,” “We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth-Graders,” “Passing Wind,” “Helen and Vi: A Study in Health and Vitality,” “For Sixty Cents,” “Cape Cod Diary,” and a few more I have misplaced.

My dad gave me my copy a couple Christmases ago. It felt inexplicable at the time, but now I know why he chose it. You should do the same.