Much of Lydia Davis ‘ short fiction could fit on a postage stamp. Maybe a more modern comparison would be that her short stories fit nicely into a Facebook status update. When discussing her work, most of the discussion is spent trying to figure out how to catagorize what she has written–short story? parable? anecdote? prose poem?

Her short story, Insomnia, reads: “My body aches so–it must be this heavy bed pressing up against me.”

That’s all there is to it.

Lydia Davis has mastered her own invented genre with such success that she won the 2013 Man Booker International Prize (worth roughly $90,000) in acknowledgement of her collected works.

Lydia Davis’ Collected Short Stories are a beautiful exploration in the power of editing. The stories are like model ships in glass-bottles–the larger world captured in minute detail, yet so concisely organized in the form. Davis is at her best when illustrating what is most familiar:

Disagreement

He said she was disagreeing with him. She said no, that was not true, he was disagreeing with her. This was about the screen door. That it should not be left open was her idea, because of the flies; his was that it could be left open first thing in the morning, when there were no flies on the deck. Anyway, he said, most of the flies came from other parts of the building: in fact, he was probably letting more of them out than in.

Not all of Davis’ stories are this brief. But they are all tightly-cropped. Although her stories are not expansive, when read they  together, depict a multi-faceted portrait of life.

Your house, being the place in which you read, can tell us the position books occupy in your life, if they are a defense you set up to keep the outside world at a distance, if they are a dream into which you sink as if into a drug, or bridges you cast toward the outside, toward the world that interests you so much that you want to multiply and extend its dimensions through books.

-Italo Calvino

Today Cereus Readers–a book club devoted to Eudora Welty & and the writers she loved–is discussing “Where Is the Voice Coming from?” (1963), “The Demonstrators,” (1968) and the essay, “Must the Novelist Crusade?” (1965).

If you’re interested in joining Cereus Readers, send me an e-mail (lisa at lemuriabooks dot com) or stop by the store.

As I read “Must the Novelist Crusade?”, I realized that this essay has just as much truth for us today as it did when Miss Welty wrote it. If you have never read this essay before, it can be found in The Eye of the Story. I feel it is also one of those essay that beckons to be read more than once. The entire essay is a marvel, and I hate to chop it up, but I’d like to share some stand-out passages with you.

From “Must the Novelist Crusade?” by Eudora Welty

‘All right, Eudora Welty, what are you going to do about it? Sit down there with your mouth shut?’ asked a stranger over a long distance in one of the midnight calls that I suppose have waked most writers in the South from time to time. It is part of the same question: Are fiction writers on call to be crusaders? For us in the South who are fiction writers, is writing a novel something we can do about it?

. . .

The ordinary novelist does  not argue; he hopes to show, to disclose. His persuasions are all toward allowing his reader to see and hear something for himself. He knows another bad thing about arguments: they carry the menace of neatness into fiction. Indeed, what we as a crusader-novelist are scared of most is confusion.

Great fiction, we very much fear, abounds in what makes for confusion; it generates it, being on a scale which copies life, which it confronts. It is very seldom neat, is given to sprawling and escaping from bounds, is capable of contradicting itself, and is not impervious to humor. There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer. Humanity itself seems to matter more to the novelist than what humanity thinks it can prove.

When a novelist writes of man’s experience, what else is he to draw on but life around him? And yet life around him, on the surface, can be used to show anything, as readers know. The novelist’s real task and real responsibility lies in the way he uses it.

. . .

We cannot in fiction set people to acting mechanically or carrying placards to make their sentiments plain. People are not Right and Wrong, Good and Bad, Black and White personified; flesh and blood and the sense of comedy object. Fiction writers cannot be tempted to make the mistake of looking at people in the generality–that is to say, of seeing people as not at all like us. If human beings are to be comprehended as real, then they have to be treated as real, with minds, hearts, memories, habits, hopes, with passions and capacities like ours. This is why novelists begin the study of people from within.

. . .

What must the Southern writer of fiction do today? Shall he do anything different from what he has already done?

There have been giant events, some wrenchingly painful and humiliating. And now there is added the atmosphere of hate. We in the South are a hated people these days; we were hated at first for actual and particular reasons, and now we may be hated still more in some vast unparticularized way. I believe there must be such a things as sentimental hate. Our people hate back.

I think the worst of it is we are getting stuck in it. We are like trapped flies with our feet not in honey but in venom. It’s not love that is the gluey emotion; it’s hate. As far as writing goes, this is a devastating emotion. It could kill us. This hate seems part shame for self, in part self-justification, in part panic that life is really changing.

. . . Yet I would like to point something out: in the rest of the country people seem suddenly aware now of what Southern fiction writers have been writing in various ways for a great long time. We do not need reminding what our subject is. It is human kind, and we are all part of it. When we write about people, black or white, in the South or anywhere, if our stories are worth the reading, we are writing about everybody.

*     *     *

Ramona Ausbel’s short story collection, A Guide to Being Born, is a wonderful romp through magical realism, exploring the fabric of life itself. The curtain between life and death is as thin as that between the real and imagined.

The New York Times review says this:

Ausubel is sensitive to our precarious position between safety and peril — locked out of full access to one another’s inner lives, locked into the pitiless machinations of our own biological systems, left certain only of our uncertainties.

The collection opens with “Safe Passage,” a story of a ship adrift in at sea, captained only by hundreds and hundreds of Grandmothers. In “A Chest of Drawers” a father-to-be develops a series of drawers in his chest in which he can store any number of sundries, including his wife’s lipstick. In “Atria,” a high school freshmen blurs the line between truth and lies after she finds herself very pregnant.

Reminiscent of the fantastical and tragic of Ausubel’s first novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, the characters in A Guide To Being Born are struggling through life-altering events and decisions in extraordinary and unusual ways. Ausubul handles the weaknesses and strengths of her characters with a deft touch, allowing their strangeness to be their salvation.

I am 3/4 of the way through Claire Messud’s newest novel, The Woman Upstairs and am having trouble putting it down long enough to finish this blog.

The narrator of this novel is angry–angry that she is moderately successful (an elementary school teacher), reliable (she calls her father every day and helped care for her dying mother), and boring. In short, everything your parents wanted you to grow up to become, but upon achieving, you realize it would have been a lot more fun to have messed around a bit.

How angry am I? You don’t want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.

I’m a good girl, I”m a nice girl, I’m a straight-A, strait-laced, good daughter, good career girl, and I never stole anybody’s boyfriend and I never ran out on a girlfriend, and I put up with my parent’s shit and my brother’s shit, and I’m not a girl anyhow, I”m over forty fucking years old, and I”m good at my job and I”m great with kids and I held my mother’s hand when she died, after four years of holding her hand while she was dying, and I speak to my father every day on the telephone–every day, mind you, and what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because it’s pretty gray and a bit muggy too? It was supposed to say ‘Great Artist’ on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say ‘such a good teacher/daughter/friend’ instead.

But this novel isn’t just a series of angry rants. It is a portrait of relationships–their saving and destructive power. Messud is at her best in describing the minutiae of life. The way light pools in a dark room. The feel of winter on a walk home. The way a new friend can rattle your daily life.