Lennon, Brian. "'Like a bar of metal'." Review of Almost No Memory by Lydia Davis. The Boston Book Review 4.5 (June 1997): 50-51.

Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original printed version.

Is failed love time wasted? This is a question posed often in the quietly magnificent fictions of Lydia Davis. In "Break It Down," from Story and Other Stories (1983), Davis's narrator is characteristically, Socratically diffident: "Maybe it works out all right, maybe you haven't lost for doing it, I don't know, no, really." Narrated by a male partner in one of the catastrophic love affairs that are Davis's subjects of choice, this story is a commanding example of the synergy of calculation and impulsiveness that sustains the psychodynamic tension of her work. As though laboring over a tax form, the man attempts to itemize the actual costs of the disaster: "And we made love, say, once a day on the average. That's $100 a shot. And each time it lasted maybe two or three hours so that would be anywhere from $33 to $50 an hour, which is expensive."

Davis's work itself eludes categorization. Her early collections The Thirteenth Woman and Other Stories (1976) and Story and Other Stories, as well as the reprise volume Break It Down (1986) scatter epigrammatic prose poems and "shorts" among longer narrative fragments that are more pensive and essayistic than the traditional short story, lacking the dramatic tension and unity it expects. These are not, however, mere sketches or notes, and they are less naked philosophical investigations, one might say, than the residue of a dramatized episteme, the quasi-diary of a disordered soul in a decentered universe, for whom the arbitrary conditions of experience preclude its transmission in aggregate form. Davis's voice could be located somewhere between the ratiocinative melancholy of Donald Barthelme and the speculative equability of Lou Robinson: laconic one moment, voluble the next, but always tightly controlled, even when her subject is---as it almost always is---unmanageable chaos.

Davis's is the language of middle-class solitude, of the introspection that obtrudes on a domestic task like preparing dinner, and the sounds familiar to the insomniac: "It is late and the night is quiet, though now and then at some distance a train passes and hoots before a crossing." For Davis's narrators, social isolation is not merely a technical condition of "literary" recollection, but the very element of life. She expertly records the nebulous anxiety of the soul alone, of routines performed in the hours when no one else is around, or, as the case may be, when she (her narrators are almost always female) is avoiding everyone: snacking, smoking, wandering through the house or apartment, sitting down to work, getting up again, staring out the window, and, as the evening passes, worrying about money, making lists, drinking, placing impulsive telephone calls, and so on---a profound existential restlessness, in which one wants to be alone but is unable to bear one's own company.

Hand-in-hand with this anxiety go the various schemes for overhaul and self-improvement: in diet, in vocabulary, in tastes and manners; the quest for the perfect set of habits (the daily walk, the stretching, the meditation); the filing systems and work schedules and notebooks---all attempts to impose order upon chaos, to inflect destiny and obtain revelation. But the revelation, for these "nameless, faceless" women, never comes: "Then she looks out at the smokestacks far away and nearly invisible across the sound and thinks, though, that this was not the revelation she was waiting for either."

Predictably, some pieces in Almost No Memory revisit and elaborate this pathology---or its primary traits, which are hyperintellectualization and passive frustration. "Meat, My Husband" is a lightly limned domestic tableau, exploring the torque that an unenthusiastic partner applies to the other's efforts to change: "I don't think he's calm because I'm feeding him so much less meat, but because he is teaching himself to accept what I do." "Jack in the Country" is a piece of Barthelmian trigonometry, sketching out relations of betrayal and confusion: "Henry cannot know, since he will not speak to Laura, that in fact a third Jack has become involved in this story, to the distress of the second Jack, for Laura's affections have already strayed from the Jack that Ellen knows only slightly and that Henry does not know, and fastened on a Jack in the country unknown to them all."

"The Professor" is the most explicit incorporation, here, of the keynotes of Davis's early work. Like her 1995 novel The End of the Story (which is perhaps more an essay about writing a novel than it is anything else), "The Professor" addresses the travails of academic life and its polarization of living and thinking. The professor's longing to escape herself ("I used to tell myself I wanted to marry a cowboy") devolves upon a student, with whom she has a single confused date (in The End of the Story, it becomes a torrid affair). Yet, where earlier work invoked marriage as a doomed arrangement, "The Professor" (and quite a few others in Almost No Memory) ends on a comic note of stability: "I still imagine marrying a cowboy, though less often, and the dream has changed a little. I'm so used to the companionship of my husband by now that if I were to marry a cowboy I would want to take him with me."

Indeed, it seems as though many of Davis's narrators have remarried, and though this is plainly not the revelation they have sought, either, the pieces in Almost No Memory are, as a rule, more deeply interiorized explorations of the conundrums of sexual love. The familiar lapidary prose poems and meditative vignettes commingle, here, with more confidently posited pseudo-fictions---and in several instances, full-fledged short stories. Davis is a master of the parable, and many of these (bearing pithy titles such as "The Race of the Patient Motorcyclists") are jewels, displaying the lush alien radiance of a Stevens poem. It's in the longer pieces, however, that Davis marks new territory, extending her contemplation of erotic and filial love into the theosophic.

"It is our human condition," the narrator reads in "Pastor Elaine's Newsletter," "which brings us back again and again to doing the things we would rather not be doing. We are far from perfection." Struggling to be patient with her children, the narrator cannot understand why she is unable to do the "right thing" even when she knows it is what she ought to do, even when she has spent hours in solitude resolving to do it. "We will... with great determination, up in the privacy of our study, up in the bathroom, anywhere we are alone. But when it comes to performing what is good... our will is weak, in fact it is powerless." In "A Man In Our Town," a Dostoevskian parable about a man who "is both a dog and its master," this conflict between selfishness and devotion is dramatized as a kind of Doppelgäanger seeking violent, possibly obliterating, reunion: "He smokes quietly until his cigarette has burned down to a stub. Then he explodes into wild anger."

For all their determination to comprehend themselves, Davis's narrators tend to lapse quickly into despair (if often a more stoical despair than that with which they began). In parables such as "The Cedar Trees," "A Natural Disaster," and "In the Garment District," and in a handful of portraits of domestic strife ("Agreement," "Disagreement," "Go Away," "The Other"), the suggestion that love is always compromise, and at best the lesser of two evils (the other being loneliness) is pacific: you cannot, these voices insist, live a life without pain; to be, in any human sense, is to suffer stress; nothing is final, nothing gets resolved, there is no paradise. "The cold and the damp will certainly get us in the end, because it is no longer possible to leave: the cold has cracked open the only road away from here."

The intellect, able to determine a correct choice, is powerless to enforce the decision: passion ignores the truth. And reconciliation may be impossible. "There is a center but the center is empty, either because she has not yet found what belongs there or because it is meant to be empty; there, but empty." One critic has described Davis's narrators as "chilling" (reviews are titled "Love in Theory" and "The Logic of Love")---reacting, I suspect, to the pessimism that seems inherent in such obstinate resistance. But the peculiarity of Davis's work lies in its continual negotiation of the terms of chaos and order, emotion and logic, the romantic and the stoical; a negotiation that still has curiosity, not resignation, as its basis, and is therefore still a vote for life. There is a readily felt catharsis in the work, an exhalation, that leaves one always with a question, not an answer, about the pain of being human and alive:

I guess you get to a point where you look at that pain as if it were there in front of you three feet away lying in a box, an open box, in a window somewhere. It's hard and cold, like a bar of metal. You just look at it there and say all right, I'll take it, I'll buy it. That's what it is. Because you know all about it before you even go into this thing. You know the pain is part of the whole thing. And it isn't that you can say afterwards the pleasure was greater than the pain and that's why you would do it again. That has nothing to do with it. You can't measure it, because the pain comes after and it lasts longer. So the question really is, why doesn't that pain make you say, I won't do it again? When the pain is so bad that you have to say that, but you don't.

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