Loved this book! I've loved Lydia Davis for a few years based on her short stories (micro- stories, more like it). This is her only full-length novel, written in 95, but for some reason I hadn't read it until now. Great story, about a short love affair and a long break-up. ( )

After 10% is stopped. Not sure if this a story of a stalker. Cannot connect with the main character ( )

At some point, the narrator describes her unwillingness to look at an old photograph of her subject because she knows he will look different than her memory of him. It's a metaphor for the writing process, when our subjects are our own lives and memories.

This is quite an interesting novel that is not a story but a relation of the process involved in writing one. It is about the failure of memory, the necessity of omitting and rearranging details in order to create a coherent and compelling narrative. The book itself is about breaking all of the rules of writing. There is no plot, no dialogue, no characterization, only vignette after vignette and then revisions of those vignettes as memories resurface and timelines are rearranged. It lacks consistency or pacing and seems to go on too long without understanding that it should have ended already. It somehow manages to fail and succeed simultaneously. I loved it.

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Lydia Davis' novel "The End of the Story" is an okay book, but not something that I would have ever read (or wanted to read) if it wasn't on the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die" list.

The novel tells the story of an unnamed narrator's obsession with an ex-lover as their relationship slowly crumbles and ends.

Davis has an interesting writing style but I found it didn't really carry the novel through here. I could see the very obvious connections with Proust's work, (and it's pretty ballsy I think to try and write a book that's going to be compared with Proust's masterpiece.) I didn't think Davis' writing was strong enough to carry off a slow moving story like this. ( )

3.5 stars
This is a book about the end of a love affair. The story begins at the end of the narrator’s relationship with a younger man. The narrator also happens to be a writer and she decides to write a book about the ending of this relationship. The book we read is therefore composed of a novel within a novel interspersed with the narrator’s commentary about the process of writing a novel based on this love affair. Themes of reality versus creative process (think Proust), relationships, and love are central to this book.

I liked this book and found the style interesting. The narrator introduces doubt regarding the accuracy of the details of her story by her commentary on the limitations of memory and how memory gets transformed through both emotions and the process of writing. It is a strange experience as a reader to be reading a novel within a novel in which the author/narrator questions the reliability of her own telling of the story (e.g., she questions the chronology of events & the events themselves). In many ways this book reminded me of some of the themes in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (then afterwards I did some research on the author and learned that she was a translator for Proust’s works). It was most definitely not a fast moving, plot driven book, but certainly an interesting read. Davis does a nice job writing about the complexities involved in the dissolution of a relationship (both parties are responsible, both parties engage in behaviors that are not so positive, etc). But, the most interesting part of the book is the discussion of how experience is transformed by the creative process (our emotions and recall of events changes when we attempt to recreate or retell events).
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An unnamed woman approaching fifty struggles to complete a novel based on her relationship, fifteen years earlier, with an unnamed man, 12 years her junior, in an unnamed hilly west coast town. She has, in effect, been writing this novel since those heady days, piecing together memories, the sometimes conflicting evidence of letters and phone records, the delicate decisions concerning first-person, third-person, close to reality or completely fictitious. She could, she realizes, keep writing this novel the rest of her life, rearranging the chronology, the emotional fit, the answer she gives to her own questions which she then refutes. Love distended, obsessional yet self-involved. Is this an affair she is describing or the novel writing process itself?

This kind of emotionally distant, hyper-aware, diffident, even obscurantist novel has its own traditions. Davis embraces these and masters them. But perhaps the fact that in a long career this is her only novel may speak to the limitations of the form. Much as one can enjoy the technical brilliance (of which there is a great deal of evidence here), I think it is an open question as to whether such feats advance the form of the novel itself. To the extent that Davis depicts an unhealthy preoccupation, a soul in torment though perhaps self-inflicted, it is a though she achieves this despite the post-modern scaffolding. And that makes you wonder what else she might achieve if she approached the novel directly. For the moment though, this is the novel we have and I have no hesitation recommending it. I just hope it isn’t the end of the story. ( )

This is the second Lydia Davis book I've put up for sale this week. Her precise (though imperfect) translation of Swann's Way carries much good will for her in my eyes, but her alleged "gemlike" and "highly-polished" prose does not shine for me. I find it neuraesthenic & gimmicky.

That said, The End of the Story is her attempt at a Proustian novel. The obsessiveness of the unrequited love of the nearly nameless principals; long descriptive sentences standing in for emotional states; the stalkings & endless dependence on gossip with friends; the guilt-tripping; and primarily, her invocation of a cup of tea to both start the novel (i.e., remember things) and end it (having remembered things) --- all Proustian touchpoints.

Since Proust is my all-time favorite writer, I would think that I would think that this is not a bad thing. Indeed, it's a pastiche, an homage, an acquired skill. (Though I think she wrote this before she began her Swann translation.)

And yet I didn't care about anything or anyone in this book & I had no patience with her OCD. (Already have some, thank you.) This is at least partially me; with reading time now a precious commodity, you really have to have me at "Hello" or your work gets skimmed (i.e., every 4th page is read, with options to re-enter, like highway on-ramps). I'm running low on fresh tries for Lydia.

Dana Goodyear's profile on Davis in the current New Yorker made me haul out all my Lydia Davis texts this week.

Q: Is the title invoking the spirit of John Barth's classic The End of the Road?
A: Why not? Steal from the best. ( )

Holy shit, this is so good. ( )

Holy shit, this is so good. ( )

I made it more than half way through this basic retread of some short stories Lydia Davis has previously written and published. Seems she writes a bit here and there about a boy and her relationship and perhaps a bit more about a girl and her relationship and sometimes about both of them and her relationship with them all and by the time I get to where I am I am so tired and too tired of reading this boring tale of nothing. Ray Johnson, the artist, whose last act was a performance piece in which he leaves a trail of friends who all know a piece of him but no one knows his all, goes and kills himself by drowning in a river. Ray used to do performance pieces in the city and called them "plays about nothing". He had a loyal following and somebody made a movie about his life that was very interesting. It was called "How to Draw a Bunny". Let me give you an example of how Ray operated. If a buyer of his hard art only could afford to pay say three quarters of what Ray's asking price was then after a bit of haggling back and forth Ray would graciously accept the deal, collect the money, and send the buyer three quarters of the piece. Whatever became of the leftover pieces of Ray's art remain a mystery, at least to me. In this novel by Lydia Davis I often noticed a short story of hers that I had already seen elsewhere in other of her collections. For example, "Story", from her first collection of short stories titled BREAK IT DOWN, tells how the narrator's boyfriend couldn't see her before she was to embark on a trip very early the next morning so she stays up all night in her obsessive search to find out why. She makes several trips back and forth to his apartment, several phone calls, and she meets him or talks to him but never quite believes his story and she shouldn't. The names in this story were changed in the novel, but the story is the same story as the text entered into her novel. This happens often in here. Too often for me. It is lame and is a poor way to garner loyalty from me. I had already purchased from amazon.com the Collected Stories of Lydia Davis based on the one superb story I read in the collection FAKES edited by David Shields and Matthew Vollmer in which I do more than mention the piece here:

http://mewlhouse.hubpages.com/hub/My-Full-Disclosure

The Lydia Davis Funeral Parlor story was about a letter she wrote to a funeral home about the attendant naming what was left of her father after his cremation his "cremains". I thought the letter so clever and brilliant and so well written that I bought the entire Lydia Davis collected short story work and now I almost wish I hadn't. The book arrived in the mail today and it matched the description online so I can't send it back. I guess I will see more of what is in it when I have more time and space to do so this coming mid winter. But the few stories I have already read in my perusal of it, as I have had the book on loan to me from the library and I have decided to return it to the library tomorrow in addition to returning the novel which I also borrowed from the library, is that Davis is at the very least a retreader and not at all an original novelist. Or she is senile. Or she has dementia? In the meantime I have to abandon her novel today because it is driving me crazy trying to read it. It is even a more daunting prospect to pick the book up to read when I have EXTINCTION now taking a back seat. In fact, just a few moments ago I did try to pick the book up to continue on with my reading and the feeling of dread was killing me. My eyes floated down below that novel to see EXTINCTION resting there so elegantly and noble at the bottom of my pile of now four books I am currently reading that sit on my end table by my chair in my personal reading library. To think I had temporarily set down the novel EXTINCTION by Thomas Bernhard in order to read this drivel ahead of finishing this great one. I am so sorry, Thomas. I got excited. Forgive me. I thought I had discovered another living genius in our midst. But it is possible she is the real deal of short story writers. Just don't tell me I should have stayed with her and the novel until the end because the novel gets so much better later. If that is the case, and I really do not doubt that this may be true, then she should have started there. ( )

As a break from the theoretical turn Evening All Afternoon has been taking of late, let me rhapsodize straightforwardly about the numerous things I love in the writing of Lydia Davis. In particular, I've just finished her 2004 The End of the Story, which treats of the end, beginning, and aftermath (in that order) of a love affair, and also of the process of transforming that love affair into a novel.

I was particularly intrigued to pick up Davis's novel, as her stories tend to the radically succinct—one or two paragraphs each, a page or less. Nor is her work overtly affective, consisting of schematic yet detailed accounts of a character's actions, surroundings, habits, or mental processes. Like Proust, whose Swann's Way she translated, Davis pays attention to nuance and is intrigued by the often-perverse twistings and turnings of the human psyche. Unlike Proust, her paragraphs tend to fit on one page, and can usually be enjoyed on their own as single, jewel-like units. While some writers are most impressive at the level of the sentence or the chapter, Davis shines on the level of the paragraph—either single paragraphs or, often, a longer paragraph followed by a shorter paragraph, which shows the earlier paragraph in a new light. It reminds me of the way haikus often work, with the last line casting the first two in a new perspective. In this paragraph pair, for example, the narrator is describing a dream she had just after embarking on the relationship around which the book revolves:

Later that night I dreamed I had found a short piece of his writing on the hall floor. It had a title page and my name on it and my address at the university. Most of it was plainly written, but it contained a passage about Paris in which the writing became suddenly more lyrical, including a phrase about the "shudder of war." Then the style became plain again. The last sentence was briefer than the rest: "We are always surprising our bookkeepers." In the dream, I liked the piece and was relieved by that, although I did not like the last sentence. Once I was awake, I liked the last sentence too, even more than the rest.

        I see now that since I hadn't yet read anything by him at the time of the dream, what I was doing was composing something by him that I would like. And although this was my dream and he did not write what I dreamed he wrote, the words I remember still seem to belong to him, not to me.

I find Davis's paragraphs so compelling because, while each one does suggest narrative motion, they are short enough that no real resolution is expected. They allow the reader simply to notice contradiction and live within it at the level of the thought or the moment, without requiring that contradiction to be resolved. Above, for example, the narrator observes the contrast between the lyrical passage and the plain writing that surrounds it; between the brevity of the final sentence and those that preceded it; between her opinions of the last sentence before and after waking. In the second paragraph we have the narrator's feeling that her dream-composition belongs to her ex-lover, which contrasts with her intellectual knowledge that it was created in her own mind. She doesn't seek to explain or interpret any of this in any explicit way, or decide that one impression is correct and the other incorrect. She simply lays out paradox in clean lines, and allows the reader to do with it what she will. I enjoy the aesthetics of art that simply dwells within contradiction, possibly because I find this so difficult to do in my own life.

Nor is it easy for Davis's narrator. Despite the detachment of the narrative style, and the fact that reading this book imparted to me a sense of calm, the narrator in her daily life appears anything but peaceful. She is anxious and high-strung, and her behavior both during and after the relationship is often less than admirable—although she seldom makes this explicit judgment herself, writing instead simply, "At that time I liked to drink. I always needed a drink if I was going to sit and talk to someone," or "Most of his friends were as young as he was, and [...] I did not regard people of that age as very interesting, even though I had been that age myself." Oddly, it's the understatement in Davis's prose that makes her depictions of depression and bad behavior particularly uncomfortable for me, as if, in calmly acknowledging these unattractive aspects of her own personality, the narrator is making room for me to do the same. The emotions felt at a given time are simply another piece of information to be recounted, no more freighted or difficult than anything else. Or, if they are more difficult, then this difficulty can in turn be acknowledged, and the narrator can live beside it.

But no matter how clearly I saw what I was doing, I would go on doing it, as though I simply allowed my shame to sit there alongside my need to do it, one separate from the other. I often chose to do the wrong thing and feel bad about it rather than do the right thing, if the wrong thing was what I wanted.

Although it can sometimes be sobering, Davis's un-emotive delivery can also be dryly hilarious. I was particularly tickled by her portraits of her own compulsive or inconvenient habits of thought, which often had me chuckling and insisting on reading passages aloud to my partner David. The same technique I outlined above, of returning to things previously discussed in order to cast them in a new light, can be extremely funny as well as meditative and thought-provoking, and Davis uses it in all these applications to good effect. My favorite humorous example of this technique, involving the narrator's confusion in the face of her own elaborate filing system for different types of fictional material, is too long to share here, but trust me, it's worth a read. Instead I'll give you this passage on lying awake scheming, which strikes me as both funny and a great union of form and content. Just as the brain of the sleepless narrator becomes more and more fixated on her crusading busy-bodying, the paragraph itself focuses in on a particular, esoteric scheme:

Now and then I am too excited to sleep, because I have a plan to reform something: if not what we eat, which should be the diet of the hunter-gatherers, then what we have in our house, which should include as little plastic as possible and as much wood, clay, stone, cotton, and wool; or the habits of the people in our town, who should not cut down trees in their yards or burn leaves or rubbish; or the administration of our town, which should create more parks and lay down a sidewalk by the side of every road to encourage people to walk, etc. I wonder what I can do to help save local farms. Then I think we should keep a pig here to eat our table scraps, and that the Senior Citizens Center should keep a pig, too, because so much food is thrown out when the old people don't eat it, as I used to see when I went to pick up Vincent's father at lunchtime. The pig could be fattened on these scraps until the holiday season, and then provide the senior citizens with a holiday meal. A new baby pig could be bought in the spring and amuse the senior citizens with its antics.

For some reason, the isolated sentence "I wonder what I can do to help save local farms" is especially funny to me.

But as much as I enjoy the humor, my favorite thing about Davis might be her examination of the subjectivity involved in our experiences of reality and in the truths we believe we know. The narrator continually struggles with what to include in her story and how to tell it. The same incident appears differently in her memory each time she remembers it, depending on her mood at the time of remembering, information she has learned in the meantime, or other external factors. In one case, she remembers the same house as three completely different settings: the kitchen in which she played a word game; the back yard through which she entered a party with her lover; the front door and living room she visited after he left her. What is the reality? Are these "really" the same place, or three separate places? Likewise, Davis explores the mental tricks of perception which create a surprising percentage of the texture of one's reality.

In the same way, I will decide to include a certain thought in a certain place in the novel and then discover that several months before, I made a note to include the same thought in the same place and then did not do it. I have the curious feeling that my decision of several months ago was made by someone else. Now there has been a consensus and I am suddenly more confident: if she had the same plan, it must be a good one.

Of course there is not actually another person making editorial decisions for the narrator, but her lived reality includes a ghost or an impression of this other woman helping her write. In combination with her koan-like style, it's Davis's insights into the unexpected reverses of human consciousness and behavior that will keep me coming back to her work. And although I think she's probably more accomplished as a "micro-story" writer than a novelist, The End of the Story has no problem sustaining its novelistic momentum from beginning to end. I look forward to more of Davis's work, in any format at all.

Notes on Disgust
(for more information on the disgust project, see here.)

Davis's style tends toward the schematic and is unlikely to provoke any disgust in the reader. Still, there is this interesting passage, in which the narrator, just before her lover leaves her, encounters him unexpectedly at a party:

It was a feeling of absolute displeasure to see him there, as though he were a hostile element in that place, a thing that intruded where it didn't belong, so that as I watched him among the moving figures, over the shoulders of the other people in the crowded place, those same features of his that had held such a positive attraction for me not long before, and that would exert such a fascinating force again not long after, were just then repugnant to me, blunt and deadly, primitive and vicious, without intelligence, without humanity, the color of clay.

What struck me so forcibly about this passage is the narrator's extremely Douglasian description of her own revulsion. Seeing her lover at this party disgusts her because he seems "a thing that intruded where it didn't belong"—matter out of place, just as Douglas describes. The narrator's momentary revulsion even causes her to perceive her lover's feature as "primitive," and we notice the dehumanizing tendency that so often goes hand-in-hand with the disgust emotion. The lover's appearance in a place that the narrator doesn't expect to see him, when she is feeling alienated from him, gives him a repulsive and marginal appearance, almost seeming to melt back into an undifferentiated lump "the color of clay," yet in his distorted, sub-human form is still monstrous, "deadly" and "vicious."

True to form, there were also times when the narrator is disgusted at herself, in particular a passage in which she remembers with loathing the chips and playing cards she and her lover bought at the store in an attempt to disguise their growing boredom with each other. But it's this passage that really stood out as intriguing and oddly extreme.

I’ve been reading on this book for seven or eight months. It’s an experimental novel, with the main character attempting to remember every event of her relationship with a man, starting with the last first. The end of the story is really the beginning. Fun to start, like most gimmicks, but grew quite wearing. Where did this author go for her degree in creative writing? ( )

Minimalist Fiction and Self-Awareness

Davis's minimalist voice (which I find myself mimicking in this review, always a sign of a style's power to inhabit the imagination and control the pen) is not at all the usual minimalism. This novel is life with all its content subtracted away. It's about a love affair, but we are scarcely told anything about what either person looks like. We hear, in passing, that the narrator likes to identify species of grass and spiders, but we aren't given any names of grasses or spiders. She falls in love with a man, but we have no idea what kind of person he is. They are both attached to a university, but we hear next to nothing about what they study or teach. She is a translator of French, but there is no French in the book. (That is especially unusual: think of other Francophiles, like Wallace Stevens or John Ashbery, who can't help thinking through French.) Nothing has content, everything is told as her recollections of actions and places.

In this contentless, abstract world the writer's voice is all we have. We listen as she wonders whether her memories are correct, and admits that some art not. We hear her descriptions of her own behavior, always written as if she were at some remove from them. When she is suffering most acutely from the absence of the man she fell in love with, we hear that she seems to see herself from a distance. That is the book's strangest moment. We have always seen her from a distance. What kind of narrator could construct a novel so impeccably abstracted from the proper names and the direct emotions of life, and then say that, in her memory, she was only abstracted in that way during a short period of grief?

The psychology of the book is absolutely without parallel. It is deeply sympathetic, sad, detached, and also, at the same time, entirely perverse and because of that perversity incomprehensible. The book is, in its own way, a masterpiece.

(Some years after I wrote this, I visited Davis at her farmhouse. It was after the publication of "Cows," and she was increasingly central to American writing. I wonder about the effect all that might have on the carelessness of the minimalism in this book, which seems sometimes untended. The more recent work has been more aware of its subtractions, more faced outward toward an audience that already expects certain kinds of reticence and abbreviation. I wonder, then, if there are two ways to be minimalist: the first, commoner kind, in which an author knows she is performing minimalist gestures; and the second, rarer and more interesting kind, in which an author is growing into awareness of her minimalisms.) ( )

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