Capturing “what it is like to live beside, beneath, above, near, and among others”: Lydia Davis’ “Our Strangers” https://ift.tt/UwS8Tpf
I hadn’t read Lydia Davis before now. I know, I know. I should have. I remember her being talked about with reverence by the fiction and nonfiction students in my MFA program, which is why I jumped at the chance to read her new seventh collection of short fiction, Our Strangers: Stories, which fascinated me.
Davis is the author of a novel, multiple short story collections, and two volumes of nonfiction, Essays One and Essays Two. The recipient of both a MacArthur Fellowship and the Man Booker International Prize, she’s also an acclaimed French-to-English translator of Proust and Flaubert. This newest book is only available for sale at independent bookstores, independent online retailers, and on Bookshop.org.
Our Strangers is sizable, composed largely of Davis’ forte: micro-fiction. It’s ironic, I think, that Davis is known for writing the tiniest of stories, given that she has translated Volume 1 of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, officially the longest novel in the world. One can see the influence of Proust in her work here, and perhaps elsewhere, given that many of these shorts are meditations, reflections, or observations written from life. Indeed, the novelist Jonathan Franzen has called Davis “the shorter Proust among us,” and I can’t disagree.
The Our Strangers stories, many of which have been published in some form or another previously, consist of snippets of conversations the narrator has overheard, passing thoughts or feelings, imaginings, seemingly inconsequential or mundane moments in time, and interactions between people or between the narrator and someone else.
Some, interspersed throughout the five parts of the book, are linked. There is a series of “claims to fame” shorts, a kind of literary “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” about the narrator’s connection to famous people, and another series on “marriage moments of annoyance.” The shortest pieces are just two lines. Some are poems. One haiku I think captures her whole gestalt makes something miniature into something magnificent:
How long the shadow is, coming across the counter, from this grain of salt.
The salt is short, but its shadow is long.
Her subject matter includes such ordinary things as a briefcase, a wasp, a bookmark, a lamp, a ping-pong ball, a seed. Her stories are not all narratives. Many feel like they are stories on the precipice of becoming stories — “proto-stories,” maybe. But they all “turn” in some way. There is a volta or fulcrum. There is a reason she is telling us what she is telling us. Not much seems to happen, and then it does. It is how she notices the items she notices that is surprising.
“Caramel Drizzle” is one example. While at the airport, the narrator overhears a flight attendant named Shannon ordering coffee with caramel drizzle as opposed to caramel syrup. The narrator keeps thinking about the drizzle versus syrup conundrum. “Later, [Shannon] walks away with another airline employee, the empty cup in her hand, the caramel drizzle inside her.” Hmm, I thought. That’s an interesting way to think about the drizzle. And again, when the narrator finds that Shannon is the flight attendant on her plane: “So, her caramel drizzle will also be going with us to Chicago.” Ha.
In the eponymous story, “Our Strangers,” the narrator describes her neighbors, present and past, her friends’ neighbors, and stories she’s heard about other people’s neighbors. About one neighbor she says, “I live my life and next door to me he lives his life, and because of what we have in common, we become a sort of family together.” In short, though neighbors are like family, they are still strangers — strangers she observes, has interactions with, and, therefore, has ownership of in a way. They are her strangers. And now they are ours. It is a beautiful, lilting meditation on what it is like to live beside, beneath, above, near, and among others.
Among my favorite stories in the collection is “Feeling Small,” in which Davis captures the intrapsychic feeling of life and existence in seven lines. I also enjoyed “Three Musketeers,” in which the narrator receives a copy of the Dumas novel and then sees three cats, three cows, and receives three vases of flowers, and the absurd “Unhappy Christmas Tree” in which an old woman believes that there is a woman inside her Christmas tree who wants to come out and get married.
Davis’ sentences are simple, but their simplicity belies their profundity. These little pieces, in Lia Purpura’s words, “transcend their size, like small-but-vicious dogs, dense chunks of fudge, espresso, a drop of mercury, parasites.” They have immense power. Davis somehow manages to capture what it is like to live day-to-day inside of a human body and with a human mind.
In short (no pun intended), it’s long past time for me to pull Essays One off my shelf.
FICTION Our Strangers: Stories
By Lydia Davis
Bookshop Editions
Published October 3, 2023
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