[We're extremely happy to report that Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, Lydia Davis's new collection, has been the #1 hardcover fiction seller the last two weeks at St. Marks Book Shop in Manhattan. St Mark's is one of the great bookstores of the world, and we're thrilled that they and their customers are supporting Lydia so heartily.] - - - -
"Some of Lydia Davis' stories are shorter than this review, but they are
funnier, smarter, and will prove more memorable. In deadpan prose, Davis
turns philosophical snippets into fiction, with moving results. It is
rare for a writer to challenge the tradition of storytelling and still be
a pleasure to read. Davis' stories are as clear as children's books and
somehow inevitable, as if she has written down what we were all on the
verge of thinking ourselves." - - - -
"...a
highly intelligent and wildly entertaining set of stories, all of them bound
together by visionary, philosophical, comic, concrete prose — part Gertrude
Stein, part Simone Weil, and pure Lydia Davis." - - - - Age, the decay of the body and the mind, the erosion of memory — the writing of Lydia Davis has for four decades examined and struggled to shore experience against these inevitable problems. Senility, thyroid malfunction and sudden fevers afflict the characters in her new collection, "Samuel Johnson Is Indignant." Diaries, letters, newspaper clippings and dictionaries defend identity when mental deterioration becomes a fact of life. Strategies of language — skepticism, wit, precision and the archival act of putting words on paper — save Davis' figures from despair when flesh, bone and brain fail them. The acts of reading and of writing -- recalling and recording emotion, thought and experience — take on meaning as symptoms or salves for characters with terminal conditions. This masterly thematic bookishness has earned Davis her reputation as the consummate writer's writer. "Samuel Johnson" is the first major work by a renowned writer published by McSweeney's Books — a logical match for Davis, as her influence is evident in the wordplay of the younger writers of the McSweeney's set. Complex narrative self-consciousness is the substance of her art; her narrators tend to be so self-aware that they are the first to doubt their ability to tell a story, to understand and convey their experiences. There are more than 50 pieces in the new book, and the vast majority of them are short pieces — fragments drawn, as the author told the crowd at a recent New York reading, from her diaries. There are also several prose poems — like "Betrayal" and "A Mown Lawn," both of which won recognition from the Best American Poetry series — that Davis composed during a period where she attempted to write paragraph-length fictions daily to maintain discipline as a writer. While the shorter pieces flicker brilliantly, the dozen longer stories extend her inquiries into memory and the power of language to preserve experience in the absence of memory. "Thyroid Diary," which appeared in the New Yorker, is narrated by a woman whose metabolism has been altered by an "underactive thyroid." The symptoms are the source of immense anxiety, and the worst is the possibility of slow thinking, because it eludes measurement in a way that a low heart rate can't, and threatens the notion of self in a far more terrifying way. The narrator translates French texts and tries to logically quantify her mental slowdown through her work. "Now if I do this whole translation, which is an important job, with my mind not working very clearly, but not knowing that my mind isn't working very clearly, then the translation may not be very good — though I may not know that. And if it isn't very good that would really be unfortunate, since some of my future income may depend on it." She revels in self-perception even as that view of the self is distorted in a way that she can't control. By the story's end, time has passed, but she finds herself "still able to learn things and remember them." Her anxiety about her condition recedes, and thoughts return to memories of words and phrases, but with heightened awareness of the acts of thinking and remembering. Davis' concerns have changed little since 1976. In the reprinted "In a Northern Country," a crippled septuagenarian sets off on a trek to arctic lands in search of a lost brother who was researching native dialects. As the cold, the natives and their dogs test his failing mettle, he sees visions, "his memory failed or he recreated things and placed them where they didn't exist." As his body flags and his senses become deranged, the idea of his lost brother becomes the only constant. In the last scene, we see him gripping a mattress, "testing his strength"; survival and life itself are again a matter of relentless self-examination. Another story reprinted from the '70s, "The Silence of Mrs. Iln" and a newer piece titled "The Furnace" portray the agony and nobility of aging grandparents as they try to continue to relate to their families in normal ways. Mrs. Iln laments inattention from her family, "If they had been more patient with her, if they had stayed with her for longer amounts of time, they would have seen something in her that was not senility." Ironically, it's a nursing home, by virtue of its library, that allows her a new life, "she tested her mind against what she read and it grew stronger. ... Among the dead, she was at last beginning to live." Davis finds dignity and even humor in the plight of her heroes and heroines. The short "Letter to a Funeral Parlor" transforms grief into dark wit, as a daughter scolds an undertaker for using the invented word "cremains" in reference to her late father, "In fact, my father himself who was a professor of English and is now being called the cremains ... would have told you that cremains falls in the same category as brunch and is called a portmanteau word." For her experimentation with form and for the intimate scope of her work,
Davis has often been classified outside American literature. But the
crises
of age, family, dislocation, ambition and financial survival are American
dilemmas, the same sort faced by Jonathan Franzen's characters in "The
Corrections." Sprawling novels have long seemed the predominant American
literary art form, but in Davis, we have a significant writer working in
miniatures. She deserves a large readership. - - - - "To herald a Davis book as "the usual" may sound like faint praise, but the
writer's loyal fans know that it is anything but. In this latest
collection, Davis (Almost No Memory, The End of the Story) doesn't
disappoint: the 56 stories — paragraph-long meditations, stories in
sections and humorous one-liners — showcase the wordplay and distillation
of meaning that have become her stylistic hallmarks, offering up crisp
twists on familiar themes. In "The Meeting," a woman's corporate encounter
sparks an internal identity crisis and rant; the childbearing conundrum is
nailed in "A Double Negative." Relationships are probed in stories ranging
from "Old Mother and the Grouch," with its fancifully imagined characters,
to the brief "Finances," which give voice to the messy issue of domestic
equality. There are riffs on mown lawns and the use of the word "cremains"
by a funeral parlor, and spooled-out ponderings on domestic priorities,
selfishness and boring friends. Communication and language are paramount in
Davis's world: an elderly man searches for his brother — a language
researcher — in a hostile environment in "In a Northern Country," and a
one-sided question-and-answer session in "Jury Duty" is the more revealing
for what is omitted. The title story is an example of the author's famous
one-liners that provide initial quick humor, then cause the reader to think
again. And a longer story about Marie Curie, told in sections, fascinates
with its interior imaginings. Eclectic and astute, Davis continues to find
new ways to tell us the things we need to know." |
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