Can’t and Won’t

Lydia Davis writes extraordinary stories about our incompetence. Not the more obvious incompetence: the slippery slides and fallings flat that are the stuff of light comedy. Davis makes her stories from our deeper, more fundamental incompetence: the way we think. The way we try and get our thinking to stop, to stay under control, to give us an answer. The way we try, over and over, to organise our thoughts. Like trying to make a dog, or a puppy, stay absolutely still.

Davis has no desire to make the usual mistake and say that her brain is the one that can tidy its mess into some secure new system. Like Beckett, like Kafka, she cunningly removes all our bigger think-attempts, all our issue and -ism making. She is much more interested in the constant, smaller effort of our consciousness: our continuous little self-broadcast of questions, corrections, trivia, shame, plans, complaints and inexplicable dreams. Her stories leave us right where we (usually) are.

If all this sounds forbidding, it should: a Lydia Davis story can introduce you to an amount of concentrated ordinary failure that you may not wish to be reminded of. But if you can, persist. She sometimes makes a kind of pattern, or report, out of the hum of daily human failure that is very funny, as in the stories ‘I’m Pretty Comfortable, But I Could be a Little More Comfortable’ and ‘How I Read as Quickly as Possible Through My Back Issues of the TLS’. And in almost every story, amusing or not, the great truth of what Davis is telling you – about us, about you – could well start to please, to deeply satisfy, your inefficient brain.

Sean O'Beirne