About halfway through Lydia Davis’s latest collection – that is, in the 74th of 144 stories sardined into just 368 pages – a woman shows her husband the story she’s been working on. He doesn’t like it, telling her “there was no beginning, no end, and no plot”. Let’s hope he doesn’t read the other 143.
That is, of course, if the woman writing the story within the story, and not just the woman writing the story about her, is Lydia Davis. Such is her gift for voice, and so intimate does much of her writing feel, that the temptation is to think of her work as barely clothed memoir. Only occasional details, such as the Michael Crichton novel one narrator falls asleep reading on a plane, stand out as almost certainly fictional (whereas the train passenger reading the Swiss miniaturist Peter Bichsel, whom Davis has translated, is much harder to distinguish from her creator).
