The ObserverShort storiesReviewThe American writer's latest short stories have lost some of their humour but hint at new depthsA new collection by Lydia Davis is a chance to revel in the possibilities of brevity. Can't and Won't spans 289 pages and features 122 stories; the majority come in at well under a page. Davis deploys many of her usual tropes. There are fictitious (or are they?) letters of complaint to frozen-pea manufacturers and marketing managers. There are arch little commentaries on grammatical oddities. There are single-sentence tales that seem to gather in complexity with each reading. ("Now that I have been here for a little while, I can say with confidence that I have never been here before," runs "Bloomington", perhaps the best of these deceptively simple short-short pieces.)
In addition, Davis adds new elements. There are 30 fragmentary "dream pieces", culled, she explains, from her own "night dreams and dreamlike waking experiences" as well as those of family and friends. There are a dozen "stories from Flaubert", formed from anecdotes in the novelist's letters, presumably encountered in the course of Davis's labours on Madame Bovary. (Her well-received translation appeared in 2010, joining previous ones of Proust and Blanchot.) These elements mark something of a departure: normally, external sources (if there are any) are not disclosed in Davis's fiction. The effect is to make this collection seem a bit less inimitably Davis-esque than usual; her own voice, though often a clear presence, is at other times somewhat muted.
Davis's fiction has always depended on a balance between feeling and detachment. Emotions are hinted at, but mostly remain concealed beneath a carapace of wry pedantry. In this collection, the feelings are more to the fore. Another way of saying this is that Davis – or at least her narrators – appear less guarded than normal. There's an unexpectedly insistent sombreness of tone. Deaths – of relatives, friends, animals – occur frequently. Many of the narrators are isolated figures, alone with dark, disturbing thoughts. A recurring theme is the anxiety of travel: lots of stories involve staying in hotels, or journeying – invariably alone – on aeroplanes or trains. (There's a particularly good, and surprisingly funny, piece about a narrowly averted air disaster.) The result is that a mood of unease, of uprootedness, permeates the collection. The overall impression is of a writer not quite settled in her life or work, and indeed a few of the stories hint at such dissatisfaction. ("Life is too serious for me to go on writing," begins one.)
The best (and, at 24 pages, the second longest) of these stories is striking for its emotional directness. "The Seals" is a meditation on the grief that resulted from the untimely death, a few years earlier, of the narrator's sister. The narrator examines this grief while making a solitary, and not entirely explained, train journey one new year. It's a remarkable piece of writing whose power stems from its combination of rawness and precision: "Once she was gone, every memory was suddenly precious, even the times I was irritated with her, or she was irritated with me. Then it seemed a luxury to be irritated."
One disappointment – though perhaps an inevitable one, given the overall tone of the collection – is that the funny stories aren't quite as funny as I expected them to be. There are only hints of the uproarious brilliance of, say, "The Race of the Patient Motorcylists" or "Letter to a Funeral Parlour". (Indeed, the new letters of complaint have the unfortunate effect of throwing into relief the superiority of the earlier offering.) It's not necessarily a bad thing that Davis is less funny than she used to be; things change and, as "The Seals" demonstrates, her stories can work very well without humour. But perhaps, in future, it would be good if she more decisively pursued fresh courses and didn't seek to reprise old hits.
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