Can’t and Won’t
Lydia Davis
[Hamish Hamilton]
With her fussy literary miniatures, Lydia Davis shares unexpected parallels with that loveable egghead, Frasier Crane. They are both painstakingly obsessed with Flaubert and his emphasis on finding le mot juste, the exact word, for every situation. They both work by scrupulously teasing out the psychological puzzles of everyday life. And Davis at her worst is like Frasier at his worst: banal, baggy, and more pedantic than precise. Can’t and Won’t gets off to a slow start in this respect. The first few pieces seem mild in the extreme, telling of rugs, bin trucks and noisy eaters. Their wry observations come off as complacent and comfortable, and they leave the reader hollowly longing for the sting of Davis’ other works.
We can afford to have these high standards with Lydia Davis, because her stories are capable of calmly, meticulously inverting the entire world. And as this collection builds, her skill is evident. The later fictions, made variously of tight minimalist sentences, meandering reflections and ‘found’ material – Flaubert’s diaries, Davis’ dreams – cleanly expose our horror, our joy and our miserly desires. Eventually, the difference between a thing and its absence vanishes, until we are face to face with our own glorious insignificance. The less there is at stake, it transpires, the more important the writing. The hypnotically inert Cows and the meanly merry A Small Story About A Small Box of Chocolates are particularly striking. With Can’t and Won’t, Lydia Davis is as exact and as exacting as ever – if you bear with her a little while.
Words: Gill Moore
For more, see our reviews of Little Failure by Gary Shteyngart and Flight by Oona Frawley and our preview of Tramp Press’ Dubliners 100 collection.
