Lydia Davis has, over the course of forty years, established the very short story — pieces ranging from a single sentence to a few paragraphs — as a serious form in American literary fiction. The collected stories, which Farrar Straus and Giroux published in 2009 and which run to over seven hundred pages, contain the bulk of the work that has shaped this development, and the subsequent books — Can't and Won't, Our Strangers — have continued the project. Davis's influence on younger American writers has been substantial; the very short prose piece, as a viable mode for serious literary work, is now part of the available repertoire of contemporary writing in a way that it was not when she began publishing, and the change is largely traceable to the body of her work and to the critical reception it has gradually produced.
This piece is an attempt at a profile that takes the achievement seriously and that is also willing to ask what the form's limits are. The Davis criticism has, on the whole, been celebratory in registers that have not always pressed on the harder questions of what the very short form can and cannot do, and the result is a critical record that has not fully described what one is engaging with when one engages with this body of work. The aim here is description rather than evaluation, which means describing both the capacities of the form and the things the form does not, by its nature, accomplish.
The Davis short piece, structurally
The Davis very short piece operates through several recognisable structural strategies, deployed across the body of work with considerable variation but with consistent underlying logic. The pieces are typically built around a single observation, a single situation, or a single line of thinking; they tend to be tightly compressed; and the prose is held to a register of formal exactness that admits very little affective or rhetorical excess. The compression is not minimalism in the Carver sense — Davis's prose is, on close attention, quite different from the elliptical American minimalism of the late 1970s and 1980s — but it is a related prose discipline, and it operates from a recognisable family of formal commitments.
The pieces tend to work through what one might call a logical or analytic move. A premise is established; the implications are unfolded with a particular kind of dry exactness; and the piece ends at the point at which the analytic line has reached its term. The form is closer to the philosophical fragment, or to the Wittgensteinian remark, than it is to the conventional short story. The reader is engaged in something like a thought experiment, with the prose producing the experiment's registration in compressed form.
The pieces also frequently work through small linguistic phenomena — the resonances of particular words, the ambiguities of particular constructions, the kinds of thinking that specific syntactic forms make available or close off. Davis is a translator (of Proust, of Flaubert, of Blanchot, of Leiris), and the linguistic attentiveness of her own short prose is recognisably continuous with the attentiveness that translation work requires. Several of the most accomplished short pieces are essentially miniature exercises in noticing what a given linguistic situation contains.
What the form makes possible
The very short form, as Davis has developed it, makes available kinds of literary attention that the conventional short story does not. The form can sustain itself on a single observation in ways that the longer story cannot; the conventional short story has to do enough narrative or characterological work to fill its pages, and the obligation often dilutes the specific interest that originally generated the piece. The Davis very short piece can preserve the original interest at full intensity, without the dilution that scaling up would require.
The form can also accommodate kinds of writing that the longer form would render unworkable. A short piece on the linguistic ambiguity of a particular sentence can be, at the length Davis works at, a satisfying literary experience. The same observation extended across a fifteen-page short story would either expand into something quite different from what it originally was, or would become a labored exercise in artificial padding. The very short form preserves the integrity of certain kinds of literary observation that other forms cannot accommodate.
The form has, importantly, allowed certain kinds of intellectual material to appear in literary fiction that had previously been confined to the essay or the philosophical note. The boundary between Davis's short pieces and certain kinds of philosophical or essayistic writing is permeable, and the permeability is part of what makes the work distinctive. Readers who want to find, in literary fiction, the precision and the conceptual interest that one might otherwise look for in philosophical writing can find it in Davis in a way that they cannot find it in most of the contemporary short story.
What the form does not do
It is also worth being clear about what the very short form, in the Davis mode, does not do. The form does not, for the most part, develop characters in the conventional sense; the pieces are too compressed for the slow accumulation of characterological detail that the conventional story relies on. The pieces in which Davis attempts longer characterological work — and there are some — are generally less successful than the pieces that work within the form's capacities. The form has its proper limits, and pushing against them has not, in this body of work, generally produced the strongest results.
The form also does not, on the whole, accommodate sustained narrative momentum. The pieces are concentrated rather than developmental; the reader is taken into a situation, the situation is registered, the piece ends. The kinds of narrative attention that the longer story can produce — the slow build, the unfolding of consequence across time, the layering of subplot and main plot — are not available in the very short form, and Davis's body of work does not attempt them in any sustained way. The work is what the form allows; what the form does not allow, is not in the work.
The form also tends to work at a single emotional register. The Davis prose voice is consistent across the body of work — dry, observational, exact, ironic in a particular cool way — and the very short form does not easily accommodate the modulation of voice across registers that a longer piece would require. Readers who want, from literary fiction, the experience of being moved through different emotional and tonal terrain may find the Davis body of work, despite its individual brilliance, somewhat monotonal in cumulative effect. The monotonality is not a flaw of any individual piece; it is a feature of what the form, as Davis works it, can produce.
The longer pieces and what they reveal
Davis's longer pieces — the novella-length The End of the Story, the longer pieces in Almost No Memory and Varieties of Disturbance — are useful evidence about what the writer's sensibility is capable of when extended into longer forms. The longer pieces are accomplished but, on most readings, somewhat less distinctive than the shorter work. The End of the Story is a novel that registers a particular failed relationship through the precision of analytic attention that the short pieces have established as Davis's mode, but the application of that mode across two hundred pages produces a different kind of book than the short pieces produce, and the difference is not, on the whole, an improvement.
The longer pieces suggest that the very short form is not a constraint that Davis is operating within but a form that has been chosen for what it specifically allows. The capacities of the very short form are the capacities the writer's sensibility most fully exploits; the longer forms accommodate the sensibility but do not provide it with the same opportunities for distinctive achievement. The very short form is not Davis's limitation; it is her medium, and the writer's recognition of this — visible in the consistent return to the form across decades — is part of what has made the body of work as coherent as it is.
The translation work and what it reveals
Davis's translations — particularly the Proust and the Flaubert — are, importantly, evidence of the same sensibility operating in a different relation to its material. The Proust translation, which appeared in 2003 and which has been the subject of considerable discussion, shows a translator working with an extreme attentiveness to the specific operations of the original prose. The translation is not a Davis-ised Proust — the long sentences and accumulating clauses of the original are preserved — but it is a Proust filtered through a translator whose own prose discipline is concentrated on related but distinct kinds of attention.
The Flaubert translation, of selected stories and the late writings, shows something similar. Flaubert is a writer whose prose has to be translated with attention to formal exactness that the standard English Flaubert had not always provided, and Davis's versions show what becomes possible when the translator's own prose discipline matches the requirements of the original. The translations are accomplishments of the same sensibility that produces the very short pieces, and reading the translations is one way of seeing how that sensibility operates when applied to longer textual material.
What the body of work amounts to
The Davis body of work is one of the more distinctive bodies of work in contemporary American prose. The very short form has been developed across forty years into an instrument of considerable precision, and the writer's work has shaped what is now possible in the form for younger writers who have come after her. The achievement is real, and it has been achieved through the specific application of a specific sensibility to the form's capacities.
The achievement is also bounded by the form's capacities. Readers who want, from contemporary American prose, the kinds of cumulative experience that longer forms produce will find the Davis body of work limited in ways that are not accidental. The body of work delivers what the form can deliver, with extraordinary discipline. It does not deliver what the form, by its nature, cannot. Honest engagement with the work involves attending to both, and the criticism that has only celebrated has not fully described what one engages with in reading the work.
The Davis influence on contemporary American writing has, in some respects, been mixed. The very short form has been taken up by many younger writers, but the discipline that Davis brings to it has not always been imitable, and the imitations have often produced work that reads as quirky or arbitrary in ways that the original work is not. The discipline is the achievement, and the discipline is what is hardest to imitate. The form, in less disciplined hands, can produce arbitrary fragments rather than the registered observations that Davis's pieces are. This is a problem for the form's broader development, not a problem with the original work, but it is part of what the wider influence of the body has produced, and it is part of what reading Davis well requires one to recognise.
