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If it is true that an intellectual can intimidate — and who but another intellectual would deny this? — there is much about Lydia Davis that should scare you away.
When she is not writing her own fiction, she is celebrated as a translator of French philosophers and classic novelists, most notably Michel Foucault and Marcel Proust. She is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly called the “Genius Award.” And the majority of her output plumbs and pummels the conventions of the short story form in six published collections over the past 35 years.
“The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis” packages four of those books: 198 individual works of art that shrug off any comforting labels. The one uncommon thread is a single writer’s ability to untwist what a reader expects from story construction, narrative, perspective and subject matter.
As challenging as all of this sounds, Davis delivers one thrilling experience after another — dozens of them — because she rarely allows artifice to trump clarity. She is a fun read.
Is she a traditional short story writer? In “Mr. Knockly,” the narrator obsesses over a dead aunt’s former lover, and the aggressive forward push of the tale has the eerie underpinnings of a Joyce Carol Oates or Ruth Rendell story. Only at the end do we realize that we know neither the name nor the gender of the narrator with whom we’ve come to sympathize.
“Helen and Vi: A Study in Health and Vitality” feels at first like a gimmick, masquerading as it does as a research report, but evolves into a rich draw-your-own-conclusions analysis of character and race. Its length, more than 40 pages, is a roomy anomaly in the Davis oeuvre.
Usually, Davis’ reputation is for the brisk presentation. In her 2007 collection, “Varieties of Disturbance,” included here in its entirety, only one of the first 15 stories exceeds three pages. The other 14 create satisfying dramas in mere handfuls of sentences.
From “A Man From Her Past”: “I think Mother is flirting with a man from her past who is not Father ... though her body is old, her capacity for betrayal is still young and fresh.” There are only seven sentences between these two thoughts, and thus ends the story, yet you turn the page knowing what’s what.
Similar short short stories waste no time, for example, in stripping away the pretension of the word “enlightened,” popping the balloon of “good taste,” examining confusion around “passing wind” — him or the dog? — and demonstrating how a long-term relationship can result in little to discuss.
Is Davis a philosopher? A poet? Certainly and maybe, and certainly and maybe to her detriment. In such an expansive collection, not everything will resonate. Occasionally, a narrative experiment just feels like a disguised rant (not a story), a modest gesture (not a story) or a bumper sticker (not a story).
Ultimately, the aesthetic label that best fits Davis is that of mini-memoirist. Whether her inspirations are from within her own world, they feel as personal as autobiography. That she has figured out almost 200 ways to create this illusion is her creative, not just intellectual, genius.
