It is said Ernest Hemingway once wrote a
six-word story for a $10 bet: “For sale, baby shoes. Never worn.” Apparently, he
even considered it his best work. “Yeah, but the story is kinda sappy,” says
Lydia Davis, surely among the very few to dare to question the masculinity of
the quintessential alpha male of American letters. “It’s interesting as a
reference point but he went right to an obvious meaning and an obvious emotional
import. I prefer things that are a little wackier, more off-beam. More
unexpected.”
The shortest story Davis has published features just five words: “Your housekeeper has been Shelly.” The title of the story is longer: Example of the Continuing Past Tense in a Hotel Room, from her most recent story collection, Varieties of Disturbance (2007). “I suppose when I’m going through the day, things occur to me suddenly and I will take note of them quickly,” says the 63-year-old, who lives in upstate New York with her second husband (her first was author Paul Auster). “Sometimes my interest and attention is caught by a piece of language. And that becomes the whole.”
Davis is one of the most acclaimed short-story writers in the US,They know how to jewelryfindings look just like the pictures you send. although admittedly her reputation prospers mainly among a literary elite. Jonathan Franzen calls her a “magician”. Dave Eggers pushes her books “on everyone I know”. Rick Moody calls her “the best prose stylist in America”. Her appeal may well broaden with the publication of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which gathers her four collections in chronological order in a small hardback format that is deliberately “compact and suited to the stories”.
Davis is undeniably extraordinary: her stories – some pieces are a couple of paragraphs, some a few sentences, others several pages long – are like splinters or shards of glass, offering up bracing, oddly tilted angles on states of minds or states of being. Many appear to track the neurological rhythms of the mind: they are restless, agitated and full of seemingly unconnected thoughts and actions, and often exist without recourse to conventional character or plot.
Yet they are neither difficult nor inaccessible; despite their ostensible limitations, they are full of tantalising drama, story, possibility. “A lot of what happens is fragmentary or brief rather than epic or huge,” says Davis. “Another writer might say,Maybe you ever meet this situation that you are still struggling in looking for a good men dress shoessupplier. ‘That’s a nice piece of material to use in a story about a relationship’, and it could be perfectly well integrated into that relationship. But for me it’s often more fun and funnier to use it as a quick, fragmentary story.”
Davis grew up among writers and readers; her father was an English professor and Norman Mailer a frequent visitor. She first read Samuel Beckett when she was 13 “and it was somehow enough to read the first few pages of Malone Dies for me to realise that a completely different approach was possible for writing a piece of fiction”. Grace Paley was another inspiration.
It was while Davis was working as a translator on Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way that she became really drawn to writing in miniature. Many of the very short pieces she wrote during that time feel like dramatised jokes.The powermonitor allows utility customers to track their energy. Mother’s Reaction to My Travel Plans (from Varieties of Disturbance) reads: “Gainsville! It’s too bad your cousin is dead!” Idea for a Short Documentary Film, from the same collection, reads: “Representatives of different food products manufacturers try to open their own packaging.Find a great selection of Glass electricitymonitor deals.”
It was, she says, “a reaction to Proust’s very long sentences and his long expiations on different subjects. I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to work really microscopic; see what I can do in a line or two that will have some substance.’”
Davis’s critics accuse her of a certain emotional detachment. Perhaps because her stories often feature nameless characters in the third person, or seem glibly to consist of a single observation, the emotional flesh can appear buried. She can sometimes display the same deadpan irony of Lorrie Moore. Yet her work is often deeply personal. Her first collection, Break It Down (1986), was inspired by the end of her marriage to Auster. It reads like an inquiry into the condition of loss, sometimes through ostentatiously narrative-driven scenarios and at other times through oblique sketches of a distracted mind.
Her later work, meanwhile, probes the relationship between language and memory and the ontological power of words, in part a response to her father’s slow death from Alzheimer’s. Suddenly Afraid simply reads: “because she couldn’t write the name of what she was: a wa wam owm owamn womn.”
“People’s minds and emotions are very interesting to me,” says Davis. “I don’t tend to do a lot of inventing. In fact, I don’t even want to.”
Translating Proust has undeniably informed her particularity with language. “It keeps me focused on words and alternative ways of saying things. You are always saying, ‘Is there another way to say this that’s closer to the original?’” Poetry has been important, too.
Davis is deeply irritated by grammatical mistakes in good writing.Our guides provide customers with facts about jewelrysupplies and advice about our many brand-name products. “There’s a real misuse of the word ‘whom’ at the moment that seems to be infecting the language,” she says. She can’t get enough of Sarah Palin and George W Bush’s malapropisms, though. “Oh, I found them hilarious!” she says. “They are both idiots who don’t know how to think.”
The shortest story Davis has published features just five words: “Your housekeeper has been Shelly.” The title of the story is longer: Example of the Continuing Past Tense in a Hotel Room, from her most recent story collection, Varieties of Disturbance (2007). “I suppose when I’m going through the day, things occur to me suddenly and I will take note of them quickly,” says the 63-year-old, who lives in upstate New York with her second husband (her first was author Paul Auster). “Sometimes my interest and attention is caught by a piece of language. And that becomes the whole.”
Davis is one of the most acclaimed short-story writers in the US,They know how to jewelryfindings look just like the pictures you send. although admittedly her reputation prospers mainly among a literary elite. Jonathan Franzen calls her a “magician”. Dave Eggers pushes her books “on everyone I know”. Rick Moody calls her “the best prose stylist in America”. Her appeal may well broaden with the publication of The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which gathers her four collections in chronological order in a small hardback format that is deliberately “compact and suited to the stories”.
Davis is undeniably extraordinary: her stories – some pieces are a couple of paragraphs, some a few sentences, others several pages long – are like splinters or shards of glass, offering up bracing, oddly tilted angles on states of minds or states of being. Many appear to track the neurological rhythms of the mind: they are restless, agitated and full of seemingly unconnected thoughts and actions, and often exist without recourse to conventional character or plot.
Yet they are neither difficult nor inaccessible; despite their ostensible limitations, they are full of tantalising drama, story, possibility. “A lot of what happens is fragmentary or brief rather than epic or huge,” says Davis. “Another writer might say,Maybe you ever meet this situation that you are still struggling in looking for a good men dress shoessupplier. ‘That’s a nice piece of material to use in a story about a relationship’, and it could be perfectly well integrated into that relationship. But for me it’s often more fun and funnier to use it as a quick, fragmentary story.”
Davis grew up among writers and readers; her father was an English professor and Norman Mailer a frequent visitor. She first read Samuel Beckett when she was 13 “and it was somehow enough to read the first few pages of Malone Dies for me to realise that a completely different approach was possible for writing a piece of fiction”. Grace Paley was another inspiration.
It was while Davis was working as a translator on Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way that she became really drawn to writing in miniature. Many of the very short pieces she wrote during that time feel like dramatised jokes.The powermonitor allows utility customers to track their energy. Mother’s Reaction to My Travel Plans (from Varieties of Disturbance) reads: “Gainsville! It’s too bad your cousin is dead!” Idea for a Short Documentary Film, from the same collection, reads: “Representatives of different food products manufacturers try to open their own packaging.Find a great selection of Glass electricitymonitor deals.”
It was, she says, “a reaction to Proust’s very long sentences and his long expiations on different subjects. I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to work really microscopic; see what I can do in a line or two that will have some substance.’”
Davis’s critics accuse her of a certain emotional detachment. Perhaps because her stories often feature nameless characters in the third person, or seem glibly to consist of a single observation, the emotional flesh can appear buried. She can sometimes display the same deadpan irony of Lorrie Moore. Yet her work is often deeply personal. Her first collection, Break It Down (1986), was inspired by the end of her marriage to Auster. It reads like an inquiry into the condition of loss, sometimes through ostentatiously narrative-driven scenarios and at other times through oblique sketches of a distracted mind.
Her later work, meanwhile, probes the relationship between language and memory and the ontological power of words, in part a response to her father’s slow death from Alzheimer’s. Suddenly Afraid simply reads: “because she couldn’t write the name of what she was: a wa wam owm owamn womn.”
“People’s minds and emotions are very interesting to me,” says Davis. “I don’t tend to do a lot of inventing. In fact, I don’t even want to.”
Translating Proust has undeniably informed her particularity with language. “It keeps me focused on words and alternative ways of saying things. You are always saying, ‘Is there another way to say this that’s closer to the original?’” Poetry has been important, too.
Davis is deeply irritated by grammatical mistakes in good writing.Our guides provide customers with facts about jewelrysupplies and advice about our many brand-name products. “There’s a real misuse of the word ‘whom’ at the moment that seems to be infecting the language,” she says. She can’t get enough of Sarah Palin and George W Bush’s malapropisms, though. “Oh, I found them hilarious!” she says. “They are both idiots who don’t know how to think.”
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