How Lydia Davis is Redefining the Short Story

Lydia Davis is a perfect companion for a long flight. Writing stories that are often less than a page, her Collected Stories is conducive to putting down for nap time. At the same time, Davis' stories are compulsively readable. Many stories are revelatory, with the main insight wrapped in one or two particularly well-placed sentences. The reader keeps reading in anticipation of what surprise the next sentence might bring. Here's a story, "Disagreement," in its entirety:

"He said she was disagreeing with him. She said no, that was not true, he was disagreeing with her. This was about the screen door. That is should not be left open was her idea, because of the flies; his was that it could be left open first thing in the morning, when there were no flies on the deck. Anyway, he said, most of the flies came from other parts of the building: in fact, he was probably letting more of them out than in."

In this story, Davis employs her signature matter of fact tone to convey a series of events without judgment. She brings to light the ridiculousness of the disagreement by not providing any of the motivation behind it. In the telling of events, she also mirrors the typical pattern of an argument. Isn't it just like a couple to argue over something insignificant?

Davis' longer pieces often consist of shorter pieces stitched together under the umbrella of one title. For example, the memorable "We Miss You," is a series of individually titled sections about an elementary school classroom that writes letters to one of its hospital-ridden members over a holiday season in the 1940's. It's a mock analysis of the children's writing to their classmate. One section analyzes references to classmates - "only two children make references to their classmates"-- while other sections analyze spelling, references to Christmas presents, and references to classroom activities. Though each individual section is blandly told, narrowly focused on a somewhat boring topic, the entire exercise is a fascinating study of a way of looking at children's letters.

Indeed, Davis' main talent is revealing the thought and the meaning behind mundane actions. The New Yorker's James Wood points out that Davis' stories are self-aware in a non traditional way. Instead of allowing readers to eavesdrop on characters' thoughts, as in the standard short story, Davis allows readers to eavesdrop on the narrator's thoughts. So we are exposed to the agony behind small decisions. Here is a character waiting for someone to call, "When he calls me either he will then come to me, or he will not and I will be angry, and so I will have either him or my own anger, and this might be all right, since anger is always a great comfort, as I found with my husband."Davis simultaneously gives us much insight into the narrator—it’s probably a she; she is kind of neurotic—while holding back vital details. Why is this woman waiting for someone to call? Why is she waiting for someone who is not her husband to call? The story succeeds in making it possible for the woman to be anyone, yourself included. As she starts to analyze her impatience and anger, you do too.

Most of my friends have not heard of Lydia Davis, and I like to describe her as someone who’s pushing the edge of what the short story does—whatever that means. Though hard to describe, this kind of boundary bending style is something you know when you see it. Here’s a final example called “Head, Heart:”

“Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again: You will lose the ones you love.
I want them back, says heart . . .
Help, head. Help heart.”

Amy Bloom: The God of Love Doesn't Exist

Amy Bloom’s new short story collection, Where the God of Love Hangs Out, is ironically titled. Ironic for the way it insinuates that there is such a thing as the God of Love, when the behavior of the characters in these short stories suggest otherwise. If there were a God of Love, Bloom suggests, then He lives in each of us, as both the angel trying to save us from poor decisions, and as the devil egging us on.

For each of the stories in Bloom’s collection features people who need to decide if they are going to pursue one relationship at the expense of another. Bloom’s characters are not driven by selfishness or passion—the usual culprits of poor decisions—but by various other psychological factors which she deftly explores. The title story is about a man and his daughter in law who find themselves questioning if they are married to the right spouse. Don’t worry, the two do not hook up, but do bare their souls to each other. We learn that they are each suffering from a case of feeling outclassed. Macy, the daughter-in-law, married into the family to gain a sense of middle-class security. Ron married his wife “for better or for worse,” but he doesn’t know when the better ended and the worse began. Now, he is thinking of trading Eleanor, she of Emily Post’s manners, for a bartender, Randeanne. Bloom sets up these doubts so that it makes sense for a young newlywed and a recent retiree to think about dumping their spouses.

The collection also includes two sets of related quartets. The opening quartet is about Clare and William, a couple “with one hundred and ten years between them,” who start having an affair when their respective spouses are in the same house, fast asleep. Clare and Williams don’t do this out of boredom, but out of an extreme comfort with each other. It’s as though they feel like they have already been married for decades. We, like they, think “hey—this isn’t so immoral, especially since the spouses seem not to care at all.” Again, Bloom hints at the psychological rationale behind this subversion. Both Clare and William feel kind of inadequate compared to their spouses. Charles and Isabel are always impeccably behaved, dressed, and fit. Clare, in contrast, is grouchy, while William is overweight. Their getting together can be seen as self-punishment for having “gotten the better end of the deal” married to their spouses for the past thirty years.

The most powerful story arc in the collection follows Lionel Jr. and Julia. Julia is 34 year old white woman married to a black jazz musician, Lionel Sr., who has just passed away. The day following the funeral, she has a carnal encounter with the 19 year old Lionel Jr, Lionel Sr.’s son from a previous marriage. The rest of the stories in this quartet trace the fall out from this one night. But while other authors may attribute all the mess in the son’s life to his stepmother’s actions, Bloom directs the real question as: how much of Lionel Jr.’s decisions through the rest of his life are really a reflection of the encounter, and how much is due to everything else? As one might expect, Lionel lives abroad and goes through women like others go through shirts. But is Julia really the cause, or just the justification? In the story’s final twist of events that permanently separate Julia and Lionel Jr. Bloom leaves us to make our own decisions.

Two Paths of the Short Story

Last year, Zadie Smith wrote a piece in the New York Review of Books that pointed to the two paths that the novel could head toward today. The first path, that followed by Joseph O’Neill, is that of lyric Realism. The main tool is the sentence. The main goal is to create a believable world using believable characters. The sentence must strike the right tone and mimic what a real person would observe and think. The second path, that followed by Tom McCarthy, is wholly postmodern. The main tool is the unreliable narrator. The main goal is to cause the reader to question what he’s reading. If O’Neill and McCarthy represent these two modes in the novel world, then their counterparts in the short story world could be David Vann and Miranda July.

David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide is a collection of five stories and a novella that won him the Grace Paley Prize. Based on his father’s suicide at the age of forty, the six tales are loosely connected around a father, Jim, a son, Roy, Roy’s mother, and Jim’s second wife, Rhoda. Vann’s stories are mostly told from the perspective of the young Roy. Since he’s a child, many of these stories are impressionistic. They are entirely believable and are meant for us to get inside Roy’s head. Each of his stories have a psychological oomph to it. In one, a grown-up Roy goes to visit the woman with whom his father once had an affair. Roy finds the woman and the woman’s husband and invites them to dinner. We see him deflate as the woman confounds his initial expectations; instead of being a cheap whore, she seems to be extremely intellectual. We also see Roy gain a new respect for his father for being attracted to such a cultured woman.
The opus of the collection is a 100 page novella about Roy and his father living on Sukkwan Island, off of Alaska for a year. An old-fashioned story of redemption, the descriptions evoke Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. While the course of events seems somewhat too perfect to be believable, Vann’s story is grounded in the tradition of legend, or myth that Melville followed. When the series of events concludes, we understand it’s about a father losing his son, and how he then tries to reclaim him.

No One Belongs here More than You by Miranda July strikes an entirely different chord. Many of July’s characters reveal ulterior motivations that make us question their reliability. For example, the narrator of one story prefaces it by saying that she is telling her ex-boyfriend in an attempt to impress him, but it happened long ago so she doesn’t really remember the details. Then she goes on to narrate a short tale about teaching elderly people to swim in her kitchen. She would make them lie down on the floor with their faces in a bucket of water to mimic a pool. Highly skeptical. Through this technique, July asks us to put aside our biases toward reality to search for a higher meaning beyond the literal interpretation of what happens on the page. For instance, another story called “The Sister” is about the protagonist’s constant inability to meet his co-worker’s sister. With each thwarted attempt, the protagonist’s fantasies become more acute. He ultimately finds out that the co-worker is gay and was merely trying to lure him into a relationship. The two men then sleep with each other. Instead of being creeped out, I like to see this as July’s attempt to force her readers to think of how genuine their own relationships are, and what our expectations are of each other.

Both Vann and July excel in their crafts. Though I prefer lyric Realism, July’s darkness and creativity are still worth reading.

Three Terrific Short Story Collections

Short stories are what I turn to when trying to figure out how fiction works. Though short stories are often less rewarding than novels, they are often punchier and more revelatory when handled by the best writers. I've recently been on a short story binge, reading the selected stories of Raymond Carver, Alice Munro's latest collection, Too Much Happiness, and Maile Meloy's latest collection Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It. Short stories are seen by most fiction readers as novels in training wheels. Yet, the difficulty of selecting exactly the right words and sentences is felt more acutely in short stories than longer novels. It's thus helpful to read collections by the best authors to see exactly what they choose to reveal, and to what effect.
Reading these three authors in such a short time period illuminates the effects of different stylistic choices. Raymond Carver's stories typically describe a short time period and may not even have a beginning middle and end. His entire story may span the course of an afternoon or a day. One of his more well known stories, "What we talk about when we talk about love," centers around a conversation four people have during dinner. Over the course of dinner, they reveal their romantic histories, as well as their current attitudes towards love. The action takes place over conversation and sideways glances. In the end, we get a picture of four people's outlook on love at one very specific point in their lives. Carver doesn't choose to tell us much about his characters' histories or their futures; his scenes are merely snapshots of his characters' lives. Readers can make up the rest.

In contrast, Alice Munro's stories are almost like short novels. Her recent collection, Too Much Happiness, features many protagonists reflecting on their lives. Munro uses this perspective to tell an entire life's story in twenty pages. By doing this, she essentially distills a life to one aspect of it. This is necessary to fit everything in twenty pages, but also gives the reader a skewed sense of what is significant in a character's life. For example, the story "Fictions" begins as the story of a marriage between a woman, Joyce, and her husband. Her husband leaves her for a lumberjack-type woman. In the second half of the story, Joyce is a 65 year old married to her second husband. At a party, she meets a woman who is the daughter of the woman that Joyce's first husband left her for. The daughter is now a successful short story writer. Joyce picks up her book at the bookstore, and -- of course-- one of the short stories is about her. The story then unfolds as a series of Joyce's predictions about the short story and the author's subsequent ability to exceed these expectations. We see everything from Joyce's perspective, but through the short story, we see everything as a film reversal.

Finally, Maile Meloy's Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It tells beautifully constructed, yet more conventional stories than either Munro or Carver. In precise, twenty page stretches, Meloy shapes a beginning, middle and end. Most of her stories are set in the Northern Midwest/Plains states and evoke a sense of isolation. They range in theme from stories of growing up to stories of settling into marriage. Meloy's voice, however, reveals something new about each of these themes. Her story "Spy vs. Spy," for example, at first appears to be a typical story of sibling rivalry. Aaron and his younger brother, George, gather for a ski trip with Aaron's family and George's girlfriend. Over the course of the trip, we learn that Aaron is the responsible one who resents his brother's free-wheeling life. Of course, Aaron challenges George to a black diamond slope, falls, and gets in a fight with George. But Meloy peppers Aaron's thoughts with childhood memories that add dimension to the characters.

"If they'd had it out when they were younger, really whaled on eac other, then maybe it would be out of their systems...But George had always been younger, and Aaron too restrained to take advantage of his greater strength."

This come at exactly the moment when we're wondering why they hadn't fought before.

In all, these three collections made terrific holiday season reading, and will be remembered all year round.