MUNDANE

I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.

Poetry of the Mundane

A review by Kate Zambreno

At a recent unstimulating dinner party, I was perusing my host'sbookshelves and pulled out a copy of Lydia Davis's Samuel Johnsonis Indignant, and turned to one of the stories in that collection,"Boring Friends," which seemed appropriate for such an occasion: We know only four boring people. The rest of our friends we find very interesting. However, most of the friends we find interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us the most boring. The few who are somewhere in the middle, with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any moment, we feel, they may become too interesting for us, or we too interesting for them.What other contemporary American author writes so well about thingsoften thought but left unsaid, and certainly not written downand framed as literature? In her previous collections as wellas her most recent, Varieties of Disturbance, Davis' domesticsurreality reads as if Jane Bowles had been able to liberate herfragments from her multitude of notebooks, a suburban GertrudeStein choosing as her material the thoughts of the wives AliceB. Toklas sat with, the "some domestic complication in all probability"alluded to but otherwise ignored in The Autobiography of AliceB. Toklas.The poetry of the everyday, the mundane, is the fabric of Davis'squietly hysterical worlds; she does not patch together the wholequilt, instead giving us neat little squares with more than occasionalthreads of brilliance. In these stories she agonizes over interactionsbetween both strangers and intimates, disturbances (to quote thetitle) both banal and serious, the awkwardness of social rituals,the unspoken hostility between spouses, the uneasy disrepair ofa long held friendship, and more -- unraveling the meaning ofall in graceful spirals.Some of the stories in Varieties of Disturbance are laugh-out-loud-while-on-the-trainfunny (and navigating the uncomfortable dance with unknowns onpublic transportation is somehow the ideal setting for their staccatorhythm as well as sometimes uneasy content). Take "Passing Wind,"where the narrator worries about a fart just emitted in a roomwith a relative stranger, and how she can mend this seeming rupturewithout escalating the situation. The frantic circumambulationsof the hyperconscious narrator's mind during these overwroughtmoments multiply to become a symphony of the absurd.Davis is most profound when examining the seeming smallness oflife, as in the marvelous "Grammar Questions," where the narratorwonders in what tense to refer to her dying father. ("If someoneasks me, 'Where does he live?' should I answer, 'Well, right nowhe is not living, he is dying'?") A noted translator of Frenchavant-garde writers such as Maurice Blanchot and Michel Leiris,many of her sketches deal with the act of translation and theexactness of language. I like to imagine that Davis writes someof the lighter pieces as a reprieve from her work of translatingclassic literary texts (she most recently translated Swann's Way,and is currently translating Madame Bovary.)Likewise, brevity is Davis's forte; there are some pieces hereonly a sentence or two long, operating more like the jokes ofa stand-up comedian who holds doctorates in philosophy and linguistics.In a fragment entitled "Collaboration with the Fly," for example,she writes: I put that word on the page, but he added the apostrophe.Some of the longer pieces in this new collection feel like cleverexercises, such as an obsessive analysis of grade-school get-wellletters. A longer story that transcends experiment is the marvelous"Kafka Cooks Dinner," in which Davis manages to pay homage tothe absurd humor in Kafka as he minutely goes over the menu fora dinner party for his unrequited love Milena, while also gettingat the angst buried underneath the awkwardness of social ritual.It is in that milieu that Davis shines, writing in the first-personabout the mercilessly self-absorbed and self-aware flickers ofthought.