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).
Davis’s stories often sit on the page like poems, or lists, or as single stray sentences. They are, to use her word, intergeneric, and are defined at least as much by formal choices as thematic concerns. But anyone who has followed her work for some or all of the last five decades will know that it has by now settled into a series of grooves, comfortably familiar where it once felt experimental. Here are more letters of complaint, a series that began with Letter to a Funeral Parlour in her 2001 collection Samuel Johnson Is Indignant; as well as dreams, small moments of domestic friction, email spam made poetic by line breaks. There are exquisite observations (the layers of a hornets’ nest resembling fine pastry), wry humour (“With most excellent workmanship / he is up there on his ladder, / with greatest care ruining / the oldest house in town”) and overheard conversations that position themselves somewhere on the spectrum between whimsy and the profound (the balance being much in whimsy’s favour).
Some of the strands in Davis’s work are metanarratives, a later story explaining choices made in earlier ones. So, in Our Strangers, Interesting Personal Vegetables is followed a couple of pages later by Commentary on Interesting Personal Vegetables. Conversation at Noisy Party on Snowy Winter Afternoon comes in both original and edited versions. Sometimes the trail is harder to follow: An Explanation Concerning the Rug Story sent me back through the book hunting for the rug story itself, which I seemed to have forgotten reading. In fact it’s in Davis’s previous collection, Can’t and Won’t, published nine years ago, a joke that rewards a long memory or an obsessive streak.
It’s easy to have a pleasant time with Our Strangers, but there is a creeping sense of returning to a favourite resort to find its attractions have faded. The letters of complaint offer a good point of comparison. Previous examples, from the never bettered Letter to a Funeral Parlour, which disputes the use of the word “cremains”, or the Beckettian doggedness with which disappointment at the number of peppermints in a tin is described in Letter to a Peppermint Candy Company, warped a mundane form into strangeness. The cremains letter, as Davis has described, “started out as an actual, sincere piece of correspondence and then got carried away by its own language and turned into something too literary to send”, but in the two new letters no such transformation occurs. Trained by her previous work, we vainly wait for the language to get carried away, and carry us away in turn.
Yet there are stories here that I think join Davis’s top rank. They are almost exclusively about ageing and death. “I cannot get used to the disappearance of my mother, or of my father, either,” one narrator remarks, while a poet whose father is dead wonders, “Do I have a father, or did I have a father?” Circling the same idea with haunting simplicity, Father Enters the Water evokes both the memory of a dead parent and their constant, absence-wrapped presence. Old Men Around Town movingly details the ailing and dead in its narrator’s community, then describes a series of deaths from 200 years before. That of one George Weekes, buried in snow, made me think of Davis’s beloved Robert Walser, another writer of very short stories, and the images of his body lying dead in a snowfield.
Winter is the book’s prevailing season and defines the most beautiful story in it. Winter Afternoon presents a cosy living room occupied by a man, a woman and two cats. First one cat falls asleep, then the man, the other cat and, last, the woman, “who has put her pen and notebook next to her on the sofa, let the magazine rest open and facedown over her chest, and tipped her head forward”. The only sound is the throb of the heating unit in the kitchen “bringing a little warmth into the house”. A vision of peaceful, temporary death, it is a perfect miniature: no beginning, no end, no plot, and without the need for any of them.
• Our Strangers by Lydia Davis is published by Canongate (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
