Lit Matters: Lydia Davis is Waiting for You

by Christopher Merkner

I’ve been told the great thing about literature is that it changes as you change. That Gatsby at 20 is not the same as Gatsby when you’re 40. I don’t know about this.

What I do know is that what was good to or for me at 20 is still good for me at 40, whereas what is good for me at 40 would not have been good for me at 20. Things have gotten bigger and smaller. I think the great thing about literature is not that it changes as you change. The great thing about literature is that it waits for you.

AlmostNoMemoryI would have been 20 when Lydia Davis was publishing the stories that make up her first collection, Almost No Memory. “Meat, my Husband,” “The Thirteenth Woman,” and “Disagreement” were making their rounds. I would never have seen Davis in print at that age because I was busy reading Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut…

I still love these big dogs, and I have loving memories of them, but there’s a reason I started teaching Davis in my 30s. I changed. In my 20s I would not have been ready for my now-favorite Davis story, “The Family,” which fractures the narrative of a family having what some might consider a “rough go” at a park one late afternoon into 47 individually enumerated steps. Here’s a teaser:

(2) Little black boy struggles with older black girl over swing, (3) is ordered to sit down on grass, (4) stands sullen while (5) fat white woman heaves to her feet, walks to him, and smacks him.

The whole story is like this—47 conjoined units, and the units are uneven, harsh, difficult to predict. Later, they’re evasive, surly, defiant of meaningful patterns. They collaborate to form a unified story that exists within and outside of the speaker: what does one do with the world one loves?

The effect of this fracturing/dividing of “life” into units is really quite chilling. It’s uncomfortable. One does not leave “The Family” pumping one’s fist. One does not leave Lydia Davis with tears in one’s soul. There is heartbreak, and it’s terribly contained. Her stories are not soulless. They are something else, something larger and smaller. Let’s look closer:

(20) Young black man picks up white girl and carries her back to fat young white woman who (21) takes her onto her lap as (22) little black boy sits up in grass and watches.

Do you see the fire there? It’s there. It’s just hermetically sealed. We might prefer not to look. I certainly wasn’t interested in looking when I was younger. Domesticity is complicated. Love and intimacy are complicated. Race, gender, socioeconomics are complicated. They are not easily regarded: who is willing to look? Most of Davis’s stories burn in this way: isolated, crisp, white hot embers, so hot they are best studied and best felt when studied.

I am drawn to Davis’s sense of detachment and cohesion, the way in which we live together, families in absurd national communion. We live so far away from one another, we just live on top of one another. Davis manages to calibrate just the right sense of perspective in her work, consistently, and that necessitates humor. But she gives you very little. Her humor makes you work. Her humor is tough.

Yet, Davis’s interviews are warm. You learn she is profoundly capable of empathy. She does not like to offend. Children, she’s declared, are off limits. Partners are fair game. She’s not using, and she isn’t pandering.

Lydia Davis is writing stories literature needs. She’s been doing it for decades now. The great thing about literature is that it’s willing to wait.

[Editor's Note: Christopher Merkner will teach a 4-week workshop, Reading as a Writer: Lydia Davis and the Art of Compression, starting November 17. To sign up, click here.]

This post is part of our annual Lit Matters series, in which writers and readers express why supporting and elevating literary arts—the mission of Lighthouse Writers Workshop— is important to them. If you agree, consider supporting Lighthouse on Colorado Gives Day. Mark your calendar for December 8 or schedule your gift now. Thank you!


Christopher Merkner is the author of the The Rise & Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic: Stories (Coffee House 2014), winner of a 2015 Colorado Book Award. His stories have been published broadly and reprinted in the Best American Mystery Stories and O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies. He is an assistant professor of English at West Chester University, and he teaches courses in fiction for Lighthouse Writers Workshop.