An Interview with Lydia Davis

I am delighted to get to pass on this link to my interview with Lydia Davis for the Writers at Cornell podcast. Davis is in town for a reading, but she was kind enough to talk with me about the complexities of translating Proust and Flaubert, using economic language to convey strong emotion, the evolution of her literary style, and the value of self-limitation.

Davis's Collected Stories has just come out in paperback, and her new translation of Madame Bovary in hardcover; snap them up after you've had a listen. (And thanks to Gallagher for the question about constraints.)

Every single day. Also, questions for Lydia Davis

There's another aspect of my current novel revision that I didn't mention in the previous post, but which has come to seem very important to me over the past ten (bloggingless) days. In the past, especially when I have been teaching, I have tended to revise in four-hour blocks of time only on days when I could set four hours aside. This generally equated to three days a week of rather fast-paced work, which I accomplished in the service of some deadline (usually arbitrary) that I imposed upon myself.

This time around, I have changed two things. One, I have no deadline ("sometime next year" is all I have told anyone) for finishing. And two, I am working every single day. This includes, say, Tuesdays, when I have, ideally, six hours to make real progress, as well as Wednesdays, when I get up at 5 and have perhaps a single hour.

What I am finding is that the one-hour sessions might well be as important as the six-hour ones--sometimes more so, even if very little (or even no) writing gets done. The key seems to be to do something every day, to keep my mind from straying too far from the book. I've written here before about the difficulty of holding an entire novel in one's head at once--it is possible for some people, and I feel I've been able to do it every now and then. But it is hard, and the more time you spend away from the thing, the more you need to recover when you return.

This method--work daily, even if it's only time enough to stare at the screen and think--is quite revalatory. I feel more connected to the book, even when I'm not really accomplishing anything substantive. We shall see if it pans out in the end.

Finally, the great Lydia Davis is coming to Cornell this week, and I will be posting my podcast interview with her here on Thursday. If there's anything you're dying to ask her, post it in the comments, and I will try to throw it into my interview.

photo: raccoons watching me work the other day.

Straight to Paperback

The least pleasant part of working in a bookstore is the moment when I have to tell the customer what the total is. Unless he or she is buying a kid's book or a magazine or Dover edition, the total is always a lot. And in our New York county, sales tax is 8%. Yow! People almost always recoil or cringe or turn the book over to check the price or ask to see the receipt. Twenty-seven dollars is too much to pay for a book. It just is!

So, okay, it's great that Lydia Davis's new book is going straight to paper. I will save some bucks and won't feel bad when I convince someone to buy it. And maybe she wanted it that way; maybe she requested it. But if not, I can't help but feel it's a bit of a smack in the face. Davis is serious and good, truly an original, ambitious voice, and this book which is marketed as a piece of fluff, as being "like a comfy chair in a sunny window: soft, warm..." FSG gives the hard covers? A book about dogs in New York deserves the hardwearing format, and Lydia Davis does not?

It's a little hard to take.

Ben Marcus on Lydia Davis

So our friend Jeffrey Frank, apropos of nothing, suddenly got us a gift subscription to Bookforum...thanks dude! Bookforum is an arm of the art magazine Artforum, and judging by this one issue, I don't think it's quite as satisfying as its sister...it seems to be striving, on one hand, for a New York Review of Books feel, but can't resist throwing in a little dash of Entertainment Weekly here and there, as in the very silly Literary Calendar column, with its fey segues and disembodied floating head graphics, or in the dorkily punning article titles. But overall it's a solid mag and a fine addition to the coffee table.

The current issue has a review of the new Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance. I'm glad to see this, because Davis is one of our favorite fiction writers ever, and her recent Proust translation pretty much kills every other one on the planet. Ben Marcus, the reviewer, likes the book, and I'm glad; and I'm glad to see Marcus writing about it, because I think Marcus's nonfiction is excellent.

But he says something weird at one point, before quoting a highly restrained passage from one of Davis's stories:

The remarkably bullheaded story "Jane And The Cane" doesn't give an inch toward the acknowledgement of emotion...

B-b-b-but it does, it totally does! Here's part of the passage:

Mother could not find her cane. She had a cane, but she could not find her special cane. Her special cane had a handle that was the head of a dog. Then she remembered: Jane had her cane...Mother called Jane. She told Jane she needed her cane.

See, to me, that is just packed with emotion. I picture the author sitting perfectly still, her hands folded, looking like she's going to explode at any second--Davis is intentionally writing as though she is a very precocious child grappling with feelings too huge to put into words.

Now, granted, I haven't read the whole thing yet--and Marcus does get around to saying that Davis indeed packs her fiction with emotion, in her own way. But the funny thing is, the description Marcus initially offers seems closer, to me, to a description of Marcus's fiction--indeed, his books are so bullheaded I can't get through them.

Are we all doing that? Seeing ourselves in the books we read, and taking writers to task for seeming to be like us? The prospect is depressing. I think maybe I am, anyway--my last couple of book reviews, when they were critical, were critical of things I myself am often guilty of, like excessive jokiness or overly loose structure. I didn't realize this until they were published.

In all fairness, Marcus isn't really taking Davis to task at all--he greatly admires her, as he should. As do I. As should you. And when I read the new book, I'm going to try to avoid seeing my goony mug glaring back from its pages.

The Greatness of Lydia Davis

At the bookstore the other day I was flipping through the spring Farrar Straus Giroux catalog, a little on edge because seeing the wrong face (enemy/rival/ex) in the FSG catalog can ruin your day, when I was delighted to see, instead, one of my favorite instense bespectacled stares: that of Lydia Davis. I always imagine that in the divorce with Paul Auster I would take her side (though I have nothing against him and know neither of them personally) because though he's been getting lots of attention for years, Davis has been doing wonderful work for just as long and has only recently been getting her due.

But though she's been one of my favorite writers since I read Almost No Memory in 1998, I almost never recommend her to anyone. Maybe for the same reason I don't like to recommend my favorite Vietnamese place to people: if you don't like that kind of thing, you won't like it, no matter how totally great it is.

So what kind of thing is it? Most of her stories are quite short and center on one or more small ideas or observations that are examined coolly and intelligently and with wonderfully restrained humor. Some of them are kind of surreal and some are internal and personal. I like the personal ones best, just as a matter of taste, but they are all of a consistent high quality that is clearly the product of a powerful artistic vision working hard to perfect itself. She's not just goofing around, or trying out the latest clever trope, or even making a political point. She's trying to work something out.

Lydia Davis reminds me how many different ways there are to be a writer, and that the most important part is staying true to your thing, whatever that happens to be.

The new book will be coming out in May and will be called Varieties of Disturbance.