A Writer, In Particular Originally published in The Bookpress, February 2002. Samuel Johnson is Indignant By Lydia Davis McSweeney’s Books, 2001 201 pages Maybe you’ve seen Charles and Ray Eames’s famous short film “Powers of Ten,” or thumbed through the abbreviated flip-book version that’s been popping up on bookstore counters lately. There isn’t much to this movie: it begins out in space, with the camera focused on the superstructures of the universe, unimaginably huge things nonetheless represented by little dots on a screen. And then the camera zooms in, and zooms and zooms; we descend through galaxies and stars to earth, to a park in Chicago, to a picnic scene where a man and woman sleep in the sun; soon the man’s hand fills the screen, and then we are in the hand, in its cells, in its molecules and atoms. The film's single shot manages to encompass exactly everything in the universe. The short stories of Lydia Davis are similar. By focusing upon the smallest of details—emotional, linguistic, circumstantial—Davis implies the hugeness of perception, and, like the Eameses, fills the reader with not only delight, but awe. So why is it you haven’t heard of her? Good question. Among those who have read her, Davis’s excellence is a foregone conclusion; through three collections of stories and a novel, she has accreted a small but fanatically dedicated audience, many of whom are writers themselves. That brings up the unavoidable classification of “writer’s writer,” a term unfortunately burdened by elitist associations, a term that causes editors and publicists to visibly recoil. This is a shame, because there is nothing “difficult” about Davis. Her language is simple, her characters are ordinary. But Davis’s perspective is truly unusual—she notices things other writers don’t—and to appreciate her requires a similar shift of perspective on the reader’s part. Considering what the careful reader gets out of such a shift, it isn’t a lot to ask. Here’s a perfect example, from Samuel Johnson is Indignant: Examples of Remember Remember that thou art but dust. I shall try to bear it in mind. That’s a whole story, from beginning to end. The impatient reader might dismiss it as pretentious or trifling, but in the context of this new collection, the story is a fine example of Davis’s brilliance, and of the way her attention to a single datum—a word or idea or event—can open up extraordinary imaginative worlds. To explain: here, we are being asked (in between two much longer, slightly more traditional narratives) to consider the word remember and its implications. “Remember that thou art but dust.” There is a fact—our mortality—being brought to our attention, and dutifully, we remember. And then we read a response: “I shall try to bear it in mind.” Here we are given a synonym: to bear in mind is to remember. But bear in mind itself is a reminder: that memory is a burden, that it is something that must be carried, in the mind. And there is a lot to bear along in our minds, and not all of it is good. In itself, this is a clever trick, a fine semantic game. But like the fact of our mortality, this little story lodges in the mind; it is with us when we read the next story in the collection, “Old Mother and the Grouch,” a sad and hilarious series of encounters between a middle-aged married couple: The Grouch is exasperated. Old Mother has been criticizing him again. He says to her, “If I changed that, you’d only find something else to criticize. And if I changed that, then something else would be wrong.” The Grouch is exasperated again. Again, Old Mother has been criticizing him. This time he says, “You should have married a man who didn’t drink or smoke. And who also had no hands or feet. Or arms and legs.” “Examples of Remember” has framed our perception, asking us to concentrate on the burden of knowledge; we are fully primed to appreciate the Grouch’s burdens: not just Old Mother, but his own paranoia, his own passive-aggression, his self-loathing. It’s all in there, but if not for the previous piece, we might miss it. There is a lot to miss in Lydia Davis’s fiction, which is to say that there is a lot to find, as well. She is masterful at mapping the convolutions of casual friendship, as in the very funny “Thyroid Diary,” the musings of a woman whose underactive thyroid is confusing her thoughts. Here, the narrator’s husband has a student in his painting class who is also the wife of the narrator’s dentist: I have always been puzzled, anyway, by the economics of the thing, because I would pay the dentist, and he would presumably give his wife the money for her courses at the college, she would pay the college, the college would pay my husband a separate fee for her tutorials, and then my husband would give me money for the dentist, I would pay the dentist, the dentist would give money to his wife, and so it would continue. Davis is attracted to these circles, these feedback loops of cause and effect. In “The Patient,” a doctor is enraged by his inability to cure a patient, and so beats her to death. “Company” describes the burden of answering letters, only to be sent replies, which must themselves be answered. She also likes to write about absence, about the hole created by a thing that failed to happen. The Barthlemethian “Jury Duty” tells, in question-and-answer fashion, the story of a woman’s failure to be chosen to serve on a jury. In “Happiest Moment,” a Chinese student describes the happiest moment of his life: “…his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.” In “Her Damage,” a woman takes a series of photographs without first putting film in the camera. This is a writer who loves language; some of these stories are about nothing else. “Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman” is an episodic literal English translation of a (possibly imaginary) badly written French text. The point of the story is the sound of the words, the weird life of this cracked, in-between language: “Together they speak enormously.” “…the sun, so wounding when in oneself everything is black…”. Another story, “A Double Negative,” reads, in its entirety, “At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want not to have a child, or not to have had a child.” The clever “A Mown Lawn” seems to mirror the swirling of sound and association in the moments before sleep, breaking open the words “mown lawn” and examining their contents: a long moan, a woman, a law, law and order, lawn order, a lawn mower making more lawn. And the very funny “Oral History (With Hiccups)” inserts, into a mock-serious monologue about the problems of adopting two grown women, large spaces, to indicate the hiccups of the narrator: “We will try to be firm but f air, as we always were with our older b oy before he left h ome.” These stories are populated by a diverse group of characters, but most of them fall into two categories. There are the people (generally narrated in the third person) who are driven to extremes by ideas, such as the murderous doctor of “The Patient,” or Alvin, the failed comedian, in “Alvin the Typesetter.” And then there is the first-person narrator: a polite, restrained, self-effacing woman seething with complicated ideas, who it is easy to imagine as a stand-in for the author herself. This character is the primary delight of Davis’s work, a person of enormous wit that is rarely displayed in dialogue, of dark thoughts that other characters are never privy to. Her restraint itself is a wonderful joke that nobody else in the stories seems to be getting, especially in “The Meeting,” where the narrator’s calm exterior during a meeting with her boss stands in ridiculous contrast to the stream of nonsensical invective racing through her mind: [Mother] would have given him a piece of her fist. See this?—shaking it right in his pan. Names for him. She doesn’t come as a water-carrier for anyone. Annihilate him, Mother! Crush him! No more—Bam!—President of this place...Oh boy! Sock! You’ll see, Mr. President! Summer-complaint! Dog’s breakfast! This narrator is also a champ of the self-negating banality. Here’s a terrific one from the deadpan “Our Trip,” a description of a tedious car journey in the company of husband and son: …At that point, I started trying to identify the new trees I had learned on our vacation, and when I gave up on that I just watched the fat on my arm ripple in the wind from the open window. The particular mental state Davis describes—this observant detachment, born of boredom—is something that no long car trip would be without, but I have never seen it described in fiction before. In addition, it is a rare narrator who will refer, without judgment, to “the fat on my arm.” From anyone else, we might expect this sentence to be followed by a self-flagellating disquisition on personal appearance—this is, after all, what our literate culture expects of its female narrators. But Davis lets the moment stand, content to let the ripples of fat be interesting in and of themselves. This is another thing I love about this writer—she has no truck with the pieties of the age, particularly those involving gender. She does not seem to feel any need to be a “woman” writer, simply, like the best writers of either gender, excellent. This doesn’t seem to be out of any kind of defiance; it is simply the way the words have fallen. There is exactly one story in this collection that involves dating, and in it, a woman confesses to having once set up a blind date, then choosing not to answer the door when the date arrives, instead watching the disappointed young man from her window. Later, when she consults her journal to confirm the story, she can find no mention of it, but does discover, in a turn reminiscent of Alice Munro, “how much I wrote about boys…boys and books. What I wanted more than anything else at the age of sixteen was a great library.” This is not to say that Davis’s writing is genderless; on the contrary, she revels in certain drab corners of femininity other writers ignore or dramatize excessively. Motherhood makes intriguing appearances in the aforementioned “Our Trip” and “A Double Negative,” and in the bizarre “My Husband and I,” a surreal riff on the physical connections among family members. This story also reminds me that Davis’s stories are packed with husbands; “my husband” is a phrase that appears often, always saddled with a complex set of associations: love, sex, anger, obligation. One of my favorite Davis stories is “The Sock,” from her first collection, Break it Down; in it, the narrator wearily refers to her ex-husband as “my husband,” indicating the still-strong connections that form the fabric of the story. The femininity of these stories is that of the individual, not of the collective; it is like the masculinity of Nathan Zuckerman, rather than that of Mike Hammer. Philip Roth recently said that the aim of twentieth-century fiction had been to explore the individual consciousness, and that this noble project had, sadly, fallen by the wayside in recent years. I tend to agree, though I would point to Lydia Davis as an important keeper of the flame. What she does is absolutely specific and wonderfully original; she is that rare writer distinctive enough to be identified by a single sentence. Like this one, for example, from “Right and Wrong”: If she praises herself, she may be correct in what she says, but her saying it is wrong, in most cases, and thus cancels it, or reverses it, so that although she was for a particular act deserving of praise, she is no longer in general deserving of praise. Nobody else would have written that. In any case, Davis is indeed, in particular and in general, deserving of praise. c2002 by J. Robert Lennon.