52 Books in 52 Weeks, it's called. The challenge is simple: read a book every week for a year.
17. Varieties of disturbance: stories.
I was intrigued when Collected Stories was released last year, and I browsed my way to this recent volume in the stacks a couple weeks ago. The cumulative opinion is consistently positive for Davis, and the general consensus is that she’s breaking rules of form, so I’m not sure my instinct to call “bullsh**” is entirely correct. But these aren’t short stories in the textbook sense. They’re… poems. Essays. Journal entries. Sometimes literally, journal entries. “I still define myself as a fiction writer for lack of another term, but I’m not really inventing. I’m taking what I see, the material I’m given, and arranging it, and really doing very little invention.” (from a 2009 interview).
I think I badly wanted these miniature prose… snippets, missives(?)… to be entirely fictional, because then there would be something to praise beyond the occasional wonderfully economical observations about life. And she does tell the truth about little things, and tell it well, which is the job of the poet. But the larger question, whether these are form-breaking stories or just something else entirely, masquerading as stories, is still unanswered for me, or leaning towards the latter. It was a very readable collection, occasionally very interesting and obviously highly intellectual. That may be the problem — the pleasures were entirely of the mind, with very little gripping the gut. And truth-telling essay work can grip the gut, as DFW reminds us (and the best of the longer-form items in this collection reminded me vaguely of him). But I was left wanting… something other than what I got.
