Varieties of Disturbance
Monday, December 15th, 2008
My imagining Lydia Davis writing about retirement and the deficiencies of the 401(k) plan last week was no accident–I was reading her excellent 2007 collection of stories, Varieties of Disturbance.
I had not read much of Davis’s work since the late 1990’s, when I was unhappily working in lower Manhattan at my first-ever corporate job. As a temporary escape from the humiliation, I would read throughout every allotted minute of my lunch break, in Battery Park during good weather and in whatever office worker eating establishment I could tolerate when the weather was cold or wet. In particular, I remember reading Almost No Memory in a dark but quiet corner in one of those disgusting buffet style pay-by-pound-of-bacteria delis. It was the middle of winter, and I was sick with some cold or lingering flu symptoms, as I so often was in those days. Amidst all that misery, discovering a writer of such originality and intelligence gave me hope that life just might have something better to offer. It made me realize that literature was the one thing in the world that might deliver me from hell that I had made of my life.
With the exception of The End of the Story, her one novel, Davis’s books have never disappointed me. The form she has mastered is the short story, in particular the short short story. Her writing style might be described as experimental, but it is not meaningless or willfully complex (or unpleasant), attributes many associate with experimental fiction. Her subject matter is typically mundane: a misunderstanding between lovers, a brief interaction with an animal, a phone call (or lack thereof), taking a walk. But each situation is thoroughly dissected and explored. Davis finds the story within the very common situations that human beings frequently experience.
Perhaps the shortest story in the collection is entitled “Insomnia” (reproduced here in its entirety…fair use!):
My body aches so–
It must be this heavy bed pressing up against me.
In “The Caterpillar,” a two page story written in the first-person, the narrator describes finding a caterpillar in her bedroom and accidentally dropping it on the stairs when attempting do carry it outside to the garden. Once dropped, she can’t find the caterpillar again. She knows she did her best and should just move on with her life and forget about the caterpillar. But she can’t. The anxiety this situation inspires lasts throughout her day until finally…
The next time I think of him, I see that I have forgotten him for several hours. I think of him only when I go up or down the stairs. After all, he is really there somewhere, trying to find his way to a green leaf, or dying. But already I don’t care as much. Soon, I’m sure, I will forget him entirely.
Later there is an unpleasant animal smell lingering about the stairwell, but it can’t be him. He is too small to have any smell. He has probably died by now. He is simply too small, really, for me to go on thinking about him.
There the story ends, though certainly not the woman’s disturbance. Although anyone with an ounce of empathy might occasionally have a similar experience, this is not a situation normally explored in prose.
Perhaps the best longer story in the collection is “Helen and Vi: A Study in Health and Vitality.” Written in the cold, objective voice of a scientific paper, the story describes the lives of two elderly women. We learn a about their personal habits throughout the course of their lives and their conversational manner. We’re presented with a detailed description of each woman’s physical appearance. We’re told of their attitudes toward animals and their work with their local religious organizations. This goes on for forty pages and it is absolutely fascinating. There’s no story in the traditional sense to carry the reader along, so why is this fictitious study of two very common-seeming people so captivating? As with so much of her work, Davis shows us here that to be human is to be endlessly complex.
That is not to say every story in the collection is a winner, of course. “We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth-Graders” is similar in style to “Helen and Vi.” Although amusing at first, it begins to feel pointlessly repetitious as it studies the get-well letters of a group of children to their hospitalized classmate. The heavily footnoted “Southward Bound, Reads Worstward Ho” was something I just didn’t want to deal with. Overall, though, this collection is a treasure-trove just waiting to be claimed by the reader with a taste for something different.
As an added bonus, the black fly on the cover design provides endless subway amusement as other passengers surreptitiously attempt to determine whether the fly is really real.
