As We Are: Lydia Davis' Collected Stories

Workmanly is a non-word that I am going to stake a claim on. If nothing else.


The Collected Stories by Lydia Davis. FSB. Hardcover. Fiction. ISBN: 9780374270605. $30.

A few weeks back I published a comment on and link to my review of the Collected Stories of Lydia Davis. I kind of slipped into a refutation and justification of the labels that have been placed on Davis over the course of her career. I refuted them by stating her accessibility and I justified them through creating a mystique around them.

Pretty ridiculous, right? I thought so.

I am going to send you back to that post in a moment but before that I want to say why I think this collection is one of the most important publications of 2009.

Let me start by saying that a substantial Introduction is the only way FSG could have improved on this publication. It would have been useful to have a canonized voice writing on behalf of the often misunderstood writing of Davis. Heck, I'd even have taken Jonathan Franzen pontificating about lost time and how Davis has sat many a time on his various nightstands. I'm just kidding, Jonathan. They tease but you do wax a good Saint Anthony.

Small criticism aside, and Catholic flavored lit joke placed firmly in my cap, I'd now like to trim the fat on my previous dithering.

Davis is accessible. She is accessible because she writes that "one true sentence" that Hemingway alluded to in A Moveable Feast. Her stories are episodes and no matter how brief or disjointed they maintain a continuity with what is both real and what is experientally already known by the reader. They are situations taken from realities, often ones typical or maybe even cliche, and so even when she is sliding towards a fanciful or unreal setting she maintains a cozy tongue-in-cheek relationship with her reader.

However clever her literary machinations might be, she never allows the obscuration to be complete. Homey becomes cruelty. Mundane becomes oppressive. Routine becomes defiant. Sanity touches insanity.

In short, Lydia Davis writes about life with such vivid reality that we cannot help but know what she's talking about.

FSG has done we readers a great service by compiling her stories and giving us a chance to see the overall aim of this brilliant writer.

Now, off to that previous post. If you like...