Varieties: A Review of Lydia Davis' Varieties of Disturbance

Lydia Davis by Theo Cote

At first she thought she could only write traditional short stories. When in college she told a friend of her ambition to write short stories and publish in The New Yorker, he scornfully suggested she might want to do more. Though she didn't feel the need to do more, her faith in the magazine waned, and her subject matter veered away from the most conventional, she labored at the typical short story for several years. But by mid-20s, having absorbed the off-center writings of Russell Edson, Franz Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, A.L. Snijders, and Peter Bichsel, she took a new direction. She began writing mostly paragraph-long stories that are intergeneric, steadying on the line between poetry and prose, essay and fiction, fables and reflections, etc.

One of such stories, in full, reads: “Beyond the hand holding this book that I’m reading, I see another hand lying idle and slightly out of focus—my extra hand.” Another, also in full, ending without a full stop, reads: “Christian, I’m not a” Yet another, again in full, lacking a full stop but also a capital letter, goes: “because she couldn’t write the name of what she was: a wa wam owm owamn womn” The first is titled “Hand,” the second “Index Entry,” and the last “Suddenly Afraid.” These are from her 2007 fourth short story collection: Varieties of Disturbance. There are fifty-seven of them. Collections like this have won the acclaimed writer, and equally acclaimed translator, the MacArthur Fellowship, the Man Booker International Prize, and the Pen/Malamud Award. 

The stories from Varieties of Disturbance are odd. They are brief, short stories. Some are one-liners, others only a paragraph long, and many short of a page. But it's not just the length. A few are in fact of typical length. There is just almost nothing typical about her. Lydia Davis is uncompromising, demonstrating via her micro fiction that, beyond the typical, a short story, or, if you mind, a short, short story, could be anything, and about anything.

Evidently, she is a minimalist and, if you factor in the length, a miniaturist. Compressed, her stories are often devoid of contexts. Settings are unlikely to be stated. There is almost always no plot. And characters are criminally few. Sometimes only the narrator, usually unspecified and undetailed and either nameless or bearing an oddly generic name like the son, resides in a story. From a fly to a hand and back to senses, unusual characters, too, feature. Small things are dressed up as conflicts. They're so little they’re barely there. Form is even a bigger deal. For her, that stuff is elastic. Her stories are: pseudo-poems, pseudo-academic studies, a list of questions, linguistic thought experiments, pseudo-expository essays, ideas for short documentary films, etc. In fact, form, more than anything, is her suspense. We never know what and how the next story will be. 

Per content, her conflicts are barely big enough to make up one. One could say her stories are about nothing. The paradox here is that her materials are from life all over. A mail with a slightly unusual syntax is as much a story as her walks at a translators’ conference. But, Ben Okri once quipped, there are no “nothings” in the human conditions. They are all “somethings.” This is not to confuse drama with effect. Her stories are barely dramatic but are more than effective. In the paragraph-long “Lonely,” for instance, no one is calling a nameless, genderless, undescribed I-narrator. They can't check the answering machine because they've been there all this time. If they go out, someone might call them. Then they can check the machine when they come back. Does a story get more storied than this?

Conversely, these stories are about a lot of “somethings.” Familial relationship features frequently. Mothers, daughters, couples, elderly women, fathers, all usually old, are reoccurring characters. The title story actually packs these people full in one take. A narrator's solitary relationship with themself or with a caterpillar, a hand, a fly, a house phone, a dead father, etc., isn't out of place, too. This theme is even almost not a pattern. There is a pseudo-essay on a baby. There is a sociological study of fourth graders. There is a health study of two elderly women. There is a poem-like prose about a discussion between two parts of the body.

Language itself is another motif. Stories are minted off the awkwardness of grammar. “Your housekeeper has been Shelly” is all one sentence of “Example of the Continuing Past Tense in a Hotel Room.” The longer, one-page “Grammar Questions" burrows deeper into linguistics. Beyond this, an interesting syntax could also add to the pleasure of a story. Thus: her structure can be askew and her diction brutally exact, all the while layering language with unexpected excitement. (Samuel Beckett is one of her earliest influences, and she considers the history of words before using them.) Similarly, seeing, a nonlinguistic type of askewness, can also provide the charge. She sometimes makes us see things slant, obtuse, anew. “Insomnia,” a poem-like couplet of sentences, does this. “Hand,” too, does. 

Above all, her fiction considers what happens to us all the time that we cannot articulate. The miracle is not only that she finds the appropriate language. Her detached probing of such little slices of life's details, empathetic and compassionate, is ridiculously precise they become humorous. All of “The Fly" reads:

At the back of the bus,

inside the bathroom,

this very small illegal passenger,

on its way to Boston.

Stories such as “The Caterpillar,” “Enlightened,” “Good Times,” “Forbidden Subjects,” “Reducing Expenses,” “Passing Wind," and “The Fellowship” further exemplify this. They not only say the unsayable. They amplify the unsayable. 

The stories from this collection are unconventional because she ditched all or most elements of the traditional short story. But she is smart. By jettisoning almost everything, she embraces almost everything, getting back what she loses. For one, she achieves specificity without being specific. The stories are not delimited with descriptors. So: unfiltered, life pours itself into the reader. That seems her specific mission: to take as much as possible artfulness off life. She consistently achieves this through understated characterization. Rarely are we openly told what a person looks like, how they speak, what they wear, how they walk, and the like. All these we piece together from the quiet piecemeal goings-on fit into unadorned sentences. Clearly, her minimal characters speak a universal language: the less crowded the people, the closer the human presence.

But she also does achieve specificity literally. Minute details perform basic functions. For one: her titles often supply specifics. “How Shall I Mourn Them" provides context for a list of sixty-one questions written in the format of shall I do something like someone. “Mother’s Reaction to My Travel Plans” specifies the two exclamation marked sentences that follow. “Suddenly Afraid” presents itself the adverbial of the one-sentence, lower-case-all-through story.

Varieties of Disturbance tears through the tenets of fiction to reach something humane. In Davis' care, a reader is freed from the expectations of what fiction should be, and thus luxuriates in a joy uncommon that is life unfiltered. Here is a stellar writer that affectively deconstructs fiction and here an elegant book that breathes on all sheets. The stories deflate, dissolve, and melt. But they don't go away. They settle at the base of your psych. They become an inside logic. This is a book you cannot pick up if you don't like being marked.