Sunday Review: The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

I must be crazy.

Every week I try to use the venue of a small paper to introduce new & noteworthy literature to an audience that probably just wants to read on the progress the Community Development Commission is making on replacing the downtown sidewalks. Or how the food drive is going at the high school.


So it is with a greater measurement of insanity that I paraded Lydia Davis' Collected Stories out to the good people of Phoenixville. Describing the literary accomplishments of a writer like Davis in quotidian terms is not easy or fun. It's like observing that the red paint on a Ferrari is "bright." Or observing the red paint at all.

It's not that I doubt the audiences ability to follow a discussion of the mechanism her writing, which is as direct a descendant of Hemingway as you'll find. It's that I want to explain Davis (of the other books I've reviewed in the Phoenix) in a manner that does not seem literary.

As someone who has owned a bookstore and worked with books for over a decade, and who is also an autodidact, I want to believe that all books are approachable. I honestly believe that James Joyce's Ulysses has suffered most from English professors cloaking it in the mystique of their doctoral papers. Sometimes a straight read of something is the best way to do it.

To paraphrase and augment Hemingway: Read one true thing and the rest will fall in place.

So before you hop over to the Phoenix and read my review of the brilliant short stories of Lydia Davis I'd like to leave you with one lone clue as to what to expect in Lydia Davis' writing.

"Then there is the other secret. There isn't any symbolysm (mis-spelled). The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know."

-Ernest Hemingway to Bernard Berenson, Selected Letters, p. 780

Okay. Now enjoy the tepid article.