The Passing From Person to Person of an Oversized Chair

Lydia Davis doesn't pose naked on her book covers. She doesn't don leather for her author photo; in fact, she poses warily, in glasses, by a picket fence. She is not a young writer or a flashy one. But this is no reason not to pay attention to her. The author of five collections of stories and the novel The End of the Story, Davis writes fiction that is marvelously sharp and witty. She has the spare lines of Beckett and Kafka, whom she has cited as big influences on her writing. And like the works of Beckett and Kafka, her stories are easy to read. Here, from her sixth collection, Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, is the story "Boring Friends" in its entirety:

We know only four boring people. The rest of our friends we find very interesting. However, most of the friends we find interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us the most boring. The few who are somewhere in the middle, with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any moment, we feel, they may become too interesting for us, or we too interesting for them.

Davis appears to have made a specialty of writing about the things other writers seem to deem unworthy of literature: dull acquaintances, the unpleasant sound of the words mown lawn, the passing from person to person of an oversize chair. Many of her stories are as short as "Boring Friends"--some are even shorter--but even the longer ones seem determined to direct the reader's attention to the plain frustrations and revelations of daily life. "Jury Duty" employs a Q&A format to give a step-by-step description of an ordinary afternoon in the local courthouse. Another story, "Our Trip," recounts the squabbles a family has during a car ride home. "Even a long drive with two people can be difficult," Davis notes wryly, "and with three it can be much worse." Mother and Father bicker over whether nine-year-old Junior should be allowed to buy a soda. Junior and Father complain that Mother's pre-moistened towelettes have stunk up the car. Mother glances at the shriveled trees by the road and wonders about deforestation.

That Davis can spin such homely incidents into memorable stories--ones that reveal a little truth about, say, the nature of family loyalty or the beauty of anonymous civic action--is a testament to the exquisite precision of her prose. One imagines her sitting for hours, days, reading each sentence aloud until the rhythm and word choice are just right. In her best stories, not a comma is misplaced.

Davis's obsession with the cadence and meaning of words--in "The Old Dictionary," the narrator compares her love for her son to her love for a rare and precious dictionary--can only have been exacerbated by her work as a translator of French novels. Since the 1970s, she has translated more than 20 books, among them works by Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Pierre Jean Jouve. France recently honored the elegance of her work by presenting her with the French Insignia of the Order of Arts and Letters.

But Davis's importance as a writer goes beyond pleasing the French--and beyond careful word choice and formal play, too. If part of the function of stories is to provide a vessel with which to share, contemplate, and preserve the substance of our lives--the story of my childhood, the story of my divorce, the story of my father's death--then listening to other people's stories--in books, in plays, in Sony surround sound--teaches us what parts of our lives are worthy of story, worthy of preservation. In a four-page piece titled "Happy Memories," Davis imagines what life will be like when she is old and alone and in pain, and her eyes are "too weak to read." She wonders what kind of memories she will replay for herself then, what kind of memories will provide comfort and consolation in those lonely days. Davis never reaches any easy answers to these questions; her stories never do. But, for the reader, the recollection of this book is likely to form a happy memory all its own.