Break It Down by Lydia Davis

The girl wrote a story. "But how much better it would be if you wrote a novel," said her mother. The girl built a dollhouse. "But how much better if it were a real house," her mother said. The girl made a small pillow for her father. "But wouldn't a quilt be more practical," said her mother. The girl dug a small hole in the garden. "But how much better if you dug a large hole," said her mother. The girl dug a large hole and went to sleep in it. "But how much better if you slept forever," said her mother.

Everybody thinks they can write short fiction, but I think a lot of writers just aren't good at it. Being good at writing novels, sustained narratives that unfold over several sittings, doesn't necessarily translate into being good at writing short stories. Lucky for us, then, we have authors who choose to make short fiction their medium, like Lydia Davis, who's often held up as one of the genre's most accomplished practitioners. Break It Down is the first of Davis' collections, and it's the first in her big omnibus The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which I will be reading over the course of several years and counting each as individual books--sue me.

The impression I was left with was--well, I don't know. I often think of the short story as something that needs to make a quick and sudden impact, like a meteor hitting the earth, but Davis' stories are often quite light. She operates mostly from a bird's-eye view, relying on lots of summary and abstraction--contra the kind of specificity and focus that many writing books push you toward--and avoids fireworks, big changes and resolutions. The stories are full instead of subtleties, as with "A Few Things Wrong With Me," a story about a woman undergoing a breakup who is forced to take a hard look at her flaws. Like many experiences, this one is brief and inconclusive, and ends with the woman deciding she doesn't want to think about herself any more: "But there will always come a time later that day or a day or two after when I ask myself that difficult question once, or over and over again, a useless question, really, since I'm not the one who can answer it and anyone else who tries will come up with a different answer, though of course all the answers together may add up to the right one, if there is such a thing as a right answer to a question like that." No revelation here, no epiphany. But what comes instead is something perhaps truer: a sense that personality is in the eye of the beholder, and that the intensity of a crisis is always fleeting.

For my money, Davis' shorter, weirder stories are her best. My favorite might be "The Brother-in-Law," about a strange, unassuming presence in the house of the unnamed narrators: "The brother-in-law. Whose brother-in-law they do not know." That's great. That's a great couple of sentences. The story, which is about how weird the guy is and how he just kind of "dissipates," contains lots of great sentences: "Even his urine divorced itself from his penis and entered the toilet almost before it had left him, like a bullet from a gun." These stories, like "Mildred and the Oboe" (she masturbates with it, we think) and "City Employment" ("All over the city there are old black women who have been employed to call up people at seven in the morning and ask in a muffled voice to speak to Lisa") are where Davis' talents for the subtle and the strange really shine. I'm aware that, by going through the book in order I'm moving through Davis' career chronologically, so one thing I'll be looking for is how these elements change and grow--does the strangeness win out, or the subtlety?