FICTION IN REVIEW

Abstract

1 6 2 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W C A L E B S M I T H This is the kind of thing that happens in a story from Lydia Davis’s recent collection, Can’t and Won’t: A person begins to perceive words and phrases in ordinary household noises. The clattering of a fork dropped on a countertop sounds like the promise, ‘‘I’ll be right back.’’ The washing machine in agitation cycle seems to be saying ‘‘pocketbook, pocketbook .’’ The plates in the dishwasher rack shiver, ‘‘neglected.’’ Catching herself listening, the person draws up a list: The glass blender knocking on the bottom of the metal sink: ‘‘Cumberland.’’ Pots and dishes rattling in the sink: ‘‘Tobacco, tobacco.’’ The wooden spoon in the plastic bowl stirring the pancake mix: ‘‘What the hell, what the hell.’’ It’s an interesting list. In each case, a word made up to imitate a sound – knocking, rattling, stirring – gives way to a phrase that C a n ’ t a n d W o n ’ t : S t o r i e s , by Lydia Davis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pp., $26; Picador, $16 paper) 1 6 3 R comes from somewhere else. The new phrase is a correction, a more accurate onomatopoeia, but it is also more than that. The person who listens and makes the list is attributing some meaning, maybe even some personality, to kitchen things. She knows that she is doing it, that the words and phrases are coming from her own unconscious. She notes that she catches them only when she is in the right state of mind. ‘‘If you hear one of these words, and pay attention, you are more likely to hear another. If you stop paying attention, you’ll stop hearing them.’’ What began as a series of observations about everyday sounds becomes, over the course of seven pages, a reflection on the boundary between describing things and animating them with your own preoccupations. The person is not really listening to the objects in her house; she is analyzing her own act of listening. She is attending to the qualities of her own attention. The person might be called a narrator, if she were narrating anything like a plot, but there is not much drama in ‘‘The Language of Things in the House.’’ No one hatches a scheme or breaks the law. Nobody gets caught sleeping around. There is an atmosphere of anxiety, and you are likely to get the creeping sense that something bad is going on. But it would have to be happening way beneath the surface, and it could be almost anything or almost nothing. If you get carried away in speculating about some repressed secret, you risk missing the weird beauty that is playing out, line by line – the defamiliarizing observations, the precision of the rendering. Still, you can hardly resist. ‘‘The Language of Things in the House,’’ like many of the pieces in Can’t and Won’t, is an unconventional story. It might be understood as an exercise in minimalism, evoking a whole human situation by way of just a few minor details, except that it also seems obsessive in its taxonomical design. It might be viewed as a game, except that it seems so serious, so fussy. Davis has invented her own form. She is, in her way, an experimental writer – except that the term seems not quite apt, somehow. (Reading Davis, you become sensitized to the exactness and the inexactness of expressions .) Why not? If I tell you over co√ee that I’ve been reading an experimental writer, you are likely to make certain assumptions. You might imagine a figure out of a bohemian, urban scene. You might think of the radical aspirations of the twentieth-century 1 6 4 S M I T H Y avant-garde. You might suspect that I’m trying to sound cool. And if you have those associations in mind, you are not getting a sense of Lydia Davis. The stories in Can’t and Won’t take place in the familiar settings of middle-class life...