'Can't and Won't' by Lydia Davis

The narrower the aperture, the greater the depth of field. The best of Lydia Davis’s stories are little more than a detail or an image or a wry observation presented without a misplaced word or superfluous comma, precise enough to suggest that great slabs of life hinge about her words, without these slabs being fiction as such. Perhaps the distinction between actuality and fiction is too coarse to be relevant to such literature of the infra-ordinary and should be left to the literatures of the ordinary (for which this distinction is constantly contestable if ultimately unimportant) and of the extra-ordinary (for which it is pre-established in the effective contract between author and reader). Thrifty with her language, characterisation and narrative to the point of asceticism, Davis’s work attains a whittled acuity subtle enough to glance off the surfaces they address without (generally) becoming imbedded in them. The contents of this book are of three kinds: 1. Stories (though, really, except for a few that don’t work so well, they aren’t stories in the usual sense); 2. Dreams - Davis’s and others’ (although these are sort of interesting, I don’t think they belong with the stories (being extra-ordinary)); 3. Translations from letters by Flaubert (which are rather good but could perhaps have been grouped separately). One memorable story in this collection, which exemplifies the deft irony which makes Davis’s humour at once sympathetic and brutal, is ‘I’m Pretty Comfortable, But I Could Be a Little More Comfortable’: merely a list of quotidian irritations that are all the more irritating for being entirely inconsequential.

(June 2014)