Lydia Davis to the Rescue
How to approach flash (and short) fiction
I’m sure some of you have caught on, but one quiet mission of book(ish) is to spread the good news of independent bookstores, libraries, real-live curators, and Bookshop (an online shop that allows you to support bookstores of your choosing). And so, when Lydia Davis made her new short story collection, Our Strangers, only available on Bookshop, in libraries, and in independent bookstores—the back of the book clearly states “Not available on Amazon”—I felt a little jolt travel from my bellybutton up into my chest. The introduction says Davis is “concerned about Amazon’s dominance in bookselling and wishes to see booklovers return to the place where books have been sold with care and thoughtfulness for centuries by dedicated fellow booklovers—the corner bookshop.” Is my heart enlarging? What a glorious woman.
Davis has been publishing “flash fiction” since 1976. Michael LaPointe, writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, calls her the genre’s “most eminent contemporary practitioner.” Her stories prowl like mischievous, middle-aged cats. They slink, play hard to get, relish trouble, and make you work, sometimes, for their affection. Some abide by the structure of Freytag’s Pyramid— exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution—with desire, thwarted desire, and escalating danger. Some present problems to be solved. Some offer up slippery moments of the mind askew, with characters worrying over the position of their hands on the steering wheel or inheriting a mother’s “crepey” eyelids. Davis’s people eavesdrop, have an affinity for train travel, they translate literature, they teach, they love cats and like to cook. They are deadpan, wry, self-conscious, elegant, hilarious (to me, at least), and often painfully sharp in their examinations of the vibrating anxieties a lot of us simply ignore, stuff down, or dismiss. In other words: her characters are writers/artists. There is no better chronicler of the fidgety mind, in my opinion, than Lydia Davis. Don’t believe me? Davis has been lauded by nearly all the big-time authors: Jonathan Franzen, Catherine Lacey, Joyce Carol Oates, Grace Paley, Zadie Smith, and Dave Eggers—to name a few.
Her stories are as short as four sentences and as long as twelve pages, with most in Our Strangers coming in around a page or two, which begs the question: how do you read a Davis story? And what is she up to in these puzzling fictions? For the untrained ear/eye, I sense a Davis story might feel…difficult? Incomplete? How might we better understand—or even approach—Davis’s profound stories of omission?
Let’s briefly examine two stories, and only two, for the sake of time and space, though much more could be written about Davis’s brilliance, and about this book’s many great stories.
A key: in the acknowledgements, Davis thanks Ron Carlson and Stephen Dixon for inspiring “Incident on the Train,” one of the more conventional stories in the book. Carlson and Dixon are both fantastic yarn-weavers in the old-school sense, and both write character-driven, propulsive stories.
“Incident on the Train” is five pages long and begins like this: “I’m on the train traveling alone, with two seats to myself. I have to use the restroom. Without thinking about it carefully, I ask a couple across the aisle if they would please watch my things for me for a moment.”
The problem of “will someone steal my things?” escalates quickly, largely as one worry piled on top of another—a comedy of errors ensues. The narrator wonders if the couple seems trustworthy after all when she takes a closer look; “…they seem very nervous,” she thinks. So, she asks the “businessman” to look after the couple looking after her things. “Can’t you wait?” he asks. The problem spools out of control from there.
So, (spoiler alert), we’ve got:
Exposition: “I’m on the train…”
Rising action: narrator asks the couple to look after things, asks man to look after couple, etc.. The narrator second-guesses, worries about a “maybe dead woman,” sitting near her seat, the maybe-dead-woman’s daughter, who insists her mother is not dead, a twelve-year-old girl behind them, who is annoyingly humming, her mother, who is annoyed at the commotion, the agitated businessman, and our narrator, who feels the increasing urge to use the restroom.
Climax: Businessman reluctantly agrees to sit in the narrator’s seat to shut everyone up.
Falling action: The businessman sits in the narrator’s seat, and the young man next to him asks why. They have a funny conversation.
Resolution: narrator feels “a little bad” about making such a fuss, and that—here’s the “change,” another conventional ingredient of short fiction—“Maybe I was wrong about him in the first place, him and his tattooed girlfriend. I didn’t trust them, just because they were young. On the other hand, his language was pretty bad.”
All that fuss, for what? Stories surge absurdly through the mind.
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“Unhappy Christmas Tree,” might fall into the category of, “Huh? What’s happening here? You call this a story?” If you have a minute, read the whole story (158 words) here.
Davis says the story was inspired by Russell Edson, “godfather of the prose poem in America.” Prose poem/flash fiction: same difference—to me, at least. (Some would argue with me, but I sense we’re mostly playing semantics. Both forms are slippery and expansive and nebulous.) They don’t always abide by narrative conventions. They offer a slice and only a slice, an impression, a jagged scene, and sometimes an entire novel’s worth of “story,” shrink-wrapped. Edson’s flashes are wacky little fables, often surreal, strange, discomforting, and funny.
“Unhappy Christmas Tree,” carries on in this tradition, mostly made up of dialogue, a conversation between an old woman and her caretaker. It begins, “An old woman believes that her Christmas tree wants to get married.”
What do we make of that? “Believes” lends a clue. The POV situates us with a sound mind confidently declaring the old woman’s mistaken perception.
Her caretaker tries to bring her back to reality. “The old woman feels a branch,” and seems, at least momentarily, placated. But the worry persists. She worries that the ornaments are “little men.”
Oh, boy, we think. What’s going on with this woman?
The story ends with the old woman saying, “But they’re hurting her! They’re pinching her! She just wants to come out and get married.”
That’s it.
So, we have a rational caretaker, talking down the old woman from the tree (hardy har). We have a living room setting where an hour passes. Lots of silence, in other words, which can be easy to miss if you’re looking for action or reading the rapidly firing dialogue. “She sits for an hour staring at the tree.” That’s a long time to sit with someone in silence!
Is this dementia? Is the caretaker new, and does she not know how to comfort the old woman? You sense the caretaker’s panic, or inability, or lack of skill, and yet, we’re right there with them as she tries to calm the old woman.
You might apply the pyramid to this story, too, but it feels, I don’t know, unhelpful. (The pyramid often feels unhelpful, to me, at least, and to my understanding of stories.) It does, however, feature two fighters fighting, that oft-preached dictum to young writers: get your fighters in the ring as quickly as possible and get them fighting. In his fiction-writing craft book, John DuFresne says, “Chase your character up a tree, throw rocks at her, and then throw bigger rocks at her. That’s plot.” In this case, the rocks might be reality slung by the caretaker, who is doing her loving best. The fighters are fighting over what is real, so you could say the contested territory is the tree, or the old woman’s perceptions.
With flash fiction—and with any fiction that feels, um, difficult, or strange, or hard to “get”—I usually start by asking a lot of questions of the characters and their decisions. And then ask: why keep reading? What question did you want answered? What character were you most drawn to or repulsed by? Why did you finish the story? Where did you get bored/confused? What made you lean in? Was the ending satisfying/unsatisfying? Why? Can you imagine what might happen next?
Usually it’s the last question that stymies the unpracticed. Lots of people want neater stories with more resolution, but what I love about short (and flash) fiction is that the form is the ultimate respecter of intelligence. Just think: when the old woman says, “But they’re hurting her! They’re pinching her! She just wants to come out and get married,” not only do we see something revealing about the character (perhaps pain revolving around a thwarted marriage, or repression of desire), we also see a hint of something to come. It’s not likely to resolve anytime soon, but we’ve gotten closer to the delusion, and that might be something the caretaker can work with. What will come next? Will this be a happy ending for the old woman? Or the caretaker? Will they keep fighting? Is this another “day in the life”?
You tell me.
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Please, please: support your local libraries and independent booksellers if you can, or shop online at Bookshop. Thanks to Lydia Davis, believer of curators, booksellers, and librarians—heroes, experts. Thanks, as always, for reading.