Lydia Davis reads

Fri April 11, followed by conversation with Matthew Stadler, at Richard Hugo House (1634 11th Ave), 7:30 pm, $8.

Here, in its entirety, is a very good very short short story:

Nearly every morning, a certain woman in our community comes running out of her house with her face white and her overcoat flapping wildly. She cries out, “Emergency, emergency,” and one of us runs to her and holds her until her fears are calmed. We know she is making it up; nothing has really happened to her. But we understand, because there is hardly one of us who has not been moved at some time to do just what she has done, and every time, it has taken all our strength, and even the strength of our friends and families, too, to quiet us.

This is my favorite Lydia Davis story, called “Fear.” I love “Fear” because it seems to answer the question–which you are frequently asked by people who do not yet know that Lydia Davis is so great, or for some demented reason do not think that Lydia Davis is so great–of why Lydia Davis is so great.

The list of reasons would include, but would not be limited to, the following: her first collection of short stories, called Break It Down, which has a kind of cult status among writers; her second collection of stories, called Almost No Memory, which contains “Fear”; and her third collection of short stories, called Samuel Johnson Is Indignant, which has won over a lot of nonwriters as well. Lydia Davis is also a translator, and is currently translating Swann’s Way, the first and most famous book of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

A Lydia Davis story goes like a sliver of ice into a complacent muscle. It does not traffic in highly polished horror, but in low-grade anxiety, in impossible conundrums of the most homely kind. There is fierce attention to the social contract, and to all the ways it is violated by people whose attention is not as fierce, and then to the possibility that it may not be possible not to violate it anyway. As a book reviewer once wrote of another writer in another publication, here is a narrator who can’t stop solving for x. Lydia Davis’ narrators solve for x in a world where x is elusive, even ridiculous.

In The End of the Story, a breathtaking novel by Lydia Davis, a narrator examines a failed relationship, taking it apart into smaller and smaller pieces, as if by breaking it into atoms she might understand why it ended and perhaps find, upon closer examination, that it might not be over at all. You know it can’t be done, but you never lose the logic of it being done; the paradoxical action–of continuing to read anyway–is what takes your breath.

In “Fear,” anxiety rises right to the surface, breaking through the comforting repetition of certain phrases and syntaxes and words. In a short space we are given a deep drink of what can and cannot be known, of the relative success and failure of sympathy with other people, of need that enables comfort and comfort that disguises need. The eponymous fear could be anything: that no one will be there to comfort one who needs comforting, or that one will be beyond comforting, or even that something knowable has been retooled beyond recognition into something else, like a story shorn of recognizable elements, or like a critic who tries hopelessly to imitate it.