I finished reading Lydia Davis' latest, Samuel Johnson is Indignant. I like her. Sometimes you find yourself respectful and affectionate toward a writer even if you do not think much of their book. Though this is not the case with the current book, it was true with her previous (not including the Blanchot translations, which were excellent, the ones I read, because Blanchot, great, also tiringly religious).

What I initially thought was that her project was aiming at aphorism in the same way Kafka's short prose achieves it; and that she failed at this admirably but somehow embarrassingly. A depth feigned at via brazenness but actually unmade. This is true of some of the stories, and -- it's asinine to say, but -- it seems like some of them could have been cut. (This, again, is ungenerous, and in writing so, I scanned the table of contents and thought what could be cut -- to be more righteous in the presumption, and realized I was too lazy for it, thus further damned.)

In any case, I think, in actuality, very few stories have this failing here (and besides in almost all cases, best one's aim exceeds one's grasp, etc.). It's a book of mature marriages, growing old, and, in some cases, dying. The wisdom here is not so flamboyantly existential as a Beckett or a Blanchot, nor as vainly (both meanings) ontological as Kafka or Borges or Calvino, but in some way, and I realize the sexism implicit in this, more quotidian, yet deeper (and sexist only if one denies the lessons of zen, though in place of quotidian I might have written "homespun").

Perhaps just that the stories are more conscious of, related to, affectionate towards, the body than these other writers, whom it seems her general ambition, if not her specific one, is comparable with.

As for her structure, sometimes her sentences are not tortured enough. That is, not that they are or are not overwritten, but that the conviction behind them borders on the flippant. Yet again, this seems necessary for her to create a voice of distanced but battleworn wisdom. Also, the book is a book, not a collection, meaning the whole is -- regardless of what I wrote earlier -- an organic whole. Her larger sense of rhythm is well developed and classic.

I liked it very much and read it over the course of a three week unconsummated love affair with a local man. We didn't really court, but I thought of our two dinners together, obsessed over them while enjoying January's slanting light come through the north room's large window. Sipping coffee in the afternoon, lounging, with the heat up, dreaming of yearning, it's memory. Then he stopped calling, and I was left with too much caffeine in my brain at night, waking tossing, watching bad movies and drinking port wine.

Nonetheless, completely recovered now, on to more reading, taking walks to the library and contemplating the moment when I will need to use their large-print section, breathing hard dry cold air.

LINKS :: lydia davis week at mcsweeney's, Ordering info,