This is the seventh installment of Shorties, a series where I review a short book off my shelf each week for ten weeks. An archive of the previous installments can be found here. Next week I will read and write about Siddhartha by Herman Hesse.
The End of the Story by Lydia Davis. Picador, 1995. 231 pages.
Because it is the title of the book, and because it is a clever book, and perhaps because it is her debut, Lydia Davis’s The End of the Story predictably begins at the end. The unnamed narrator is searching for her unnamed lover for the last time; she tells us from the opening line that the last time she saw him she didn’t know it would be the last, so we also know that by the time we get to the true end of the novel, she won’t see him again.
But first, of course, we must go back to the beginning; the story starts at their meeting and follows the characters through their strange affair. She is ten or so years his senior, a professor and translator; he is a student, albeit an older student, in his early twenties. They spend most of their time together in her strange, large bedroom, furnished with a bed and a card table and two uncomfortable metal chairs. He sleeps there from practically the first time they meet because he has nowhere better to sleep. He works at the gas station. She works at the uncomfortable card table.
Things continue until they fall apart, and in all it’s only a couple of years of time that the book encompasses, in which the narrator is trying to remember things actively but with the foggy distance of age. Throughout the novel, the narrator writes often about writing the novel, which is the one we’re reading now. She pieces together diaries and letters and photos and struggles against the book as it comes out in chunks; there is never a chapter break, just line breaks which give the book the quality of a long series of vignettes.
I could go on describing the book and its somewhat grueling plot—grueling because anyone who has been in and then fallen out of love will recognize the specific patterns Davis’s narrator documents in extreme detail—but instead I thought it might be worthwhile instead to write first about how I came to Lydia Davis, and how it made me feel to read this book, and then about the process I’ve accidentally created in the course of this project of writing little book reviews every week.
Well, the way I learned about Lydia Davis is easy: My mentor mentioned her in a passing comment, and then I went on the journey of the last real summer of my life, the summer between my two years of graduate school. This journey encompassed driving from Flagstaff to Texas, then on to New Orleans, where I’d work summer camp at my former preschool job for a month, pocket the cash, and then drive on alone with my camping gear and crafting supplies and important things piled in IKEA bags in the backseat. I stayed in a second floor sublet behind the Winn Dixie in Mid-City, dragging all my clothes and groceries and things I didn’t hardly use up the narrow stairs for a month and a half stay, losing money I barely had on that place while still paying for my empty room in Flagstaff. When camp ended—or when I tired of working it, which I was barely doing part time to begin with, since I’d set the terms so unabashedly, working Monday through Thursday and only until lunch—I stayed in town for a bit longer, drinking until the morning hours with my friends, or going out and seeing my ex and all of his friends, riding my yellow Bianchi down the Greenway. Then, when my sublease ended, I went to Atlanta, then to Kentucky where I camped alone, then to Chicago, then Michigan, then through the Midwest, where either I camped or slept in hotels, then to Colorado.
The morning I was set to leave Chicago, Margaret and I had breakfast—I believe this was the morning we went to the vegetarian diner with her now-ex, and I sat across from them in a booth in the center of the restaurant—and then I drove us to Quimby’s on North Ave. I was in town only for two nights, and we had to make the most of my last morning. On the sale shelf in the back of the store I spotted my copy of Essays One, a thick hardback with a green dust jacket. It was $7.99. I bought it with the hope that it would make me smart enough to come up with my thesis over the course of my drive, but I didn’t read it all that summer.
Essays One, which I’ve still never finished, became an important book for me, the kind I kept within reach in my small bedrooms. In it, Davis writes about the writing and translating life in her frank, brief style, though on occasion she lets herself really go wild. Her advice is so plainly written, so clear, and so true; I felt as though I was really taught by her book, and I felt her as a genuine presence on the page and in my world as a writer. Her style is simultaneously sage and uncondescending.
In the midst of summer travels four years after first encountering Davis, I began at the beginning, with her debut. I was struck most by the tone The End of the Story takes—how it is so like the Lydia Davis I know, measured and clean and thoughtful. In Essays One, Davis includes a short essay about revising a sentence, including sentences of hers and how she changed them over several drafts. One has the sense that many of the sentences in The End went through this painstaking process, coming upon sentences with the careful trajectory of Davis’s later work.
This closely written prose required, for me, a lot of rereading, scanning back to the last sentence I could recall and then trying again until I had the page or moment back in my grasp. The End of the Story works and then reworks the events of what turn out to be a short period of time; flipping to the front of the book just after I’d finished it, I realized that the start of the book had announced almost every major plot point that would later occur. In the slow, internal prose of the narrator, it’s easy to forget that she’s already said it all, information-wise, because, as in the way of memory, she turns each thing over like it is brand new and she’s coming upon it for the first time, this new angle that memory creates.
Since the novel makes plain the act of its writing as the reader reads it, I thought that I could mimic the style by writing out the process I’ve created for this series, reading and then writing about a new book each week. I’m always thinking so much about mimicry.
If we imagine that the week begins on Monday, then every week begins with an edit: I wake up with ample time before work, which I do at home on Mondays, and read whatever draft of the blog I have ready from top to bottom. I run it through MS Word, because it has the best spell check, and then I make the changes and find an image before importing it and scheduling it to send, ideally later that same morning. By this point—because I list it at the top of the post—I have also chosen a new book for the week, so that on that day I begin carrying the new book around with me.
From Tuesday to Thursday I may or may not start the book. Usually I don’t, and instead think about the book a lot, how in the act of not reading it I am making my life harder. I see the book in my tote bag or backpack. I may put it on my desk at work to encourage myself to read it while I eat lunch. I pack and unpack the book from work bag to day bag and take it from the coffee table to my nightstand. All the while it is unlikely I have even so much as cracked it to the title page, excepting the night or morning when I decided I would read it next, when I likely read the opening line.
When Friday rolls around, I wake up with the force of the book at the front of my mind—its potential becomes what will occupy half of my day (if I am working only a half day), and the remainder of my weekend. I will find time to read the book, and this is everything I know about my immediate future. This is a complete truth that stands despite any plans I may have, whether I will drink too much or not, whether I will get coffee with a friend or not. I may do these things—I will also read the book.
And from Friday to Sunday I do so, which this week included taking a flight, and then rushing around New York City for a forty-ish hour trip there before heading north. I woke up early our first of two mornings in the city with lots of energy, I think because I knew I needed to fortify myself to be able to finish the novel. For the rest of Saturday and Sunday, I stole away whatever quiet (and sometimes not quiet) moments I had to read with an ugly mechanical pencil behind my ear. I finished the book and began writing on Sunday after ten at night, which is later than usual, though not much later.
Then I begin the process again, and will do so three more times, until this little thing I started is over and I can go back to being my normal self, a bad reader, an inconsistent writer, feeling odd about the state of myself. Or maybe I’ll continue it on just for the hell of it.
It occurred to me reading the book that I don’t lately spend a lot of time alone. When I had roommates, or when I was driving across lengths of the country with some regularity, I spent quite a lot more time alone than I do now, much like the narrator of this novel does, even as she’s falling in or out of love. She lives with a roommate, and thus spends so much time in her room, an experience I remember clearly and weirdly longed for after reading of Davis’s thirty-something.
Near the end of the book, as she wades through the difficult, cold months of her breakup, the narrator writes of her absurd systems, a passage I’m quoting fully here because it struck me as so utterly of me:
Because I was alone so much, I would think about how I could do things in a more logical way, as though it weren’t enough just to do what had to be done one way or another. I would make a system of rewards for myself: no smoking until evening, for instance. Or I set aside different hours of the day for different activities. I said I would write one letter every day after the mail came. But I did not do that for long. I did not answer most of the letters that came to me. I would plan to walk south in the early part of the afternoon, so as to get a little sun on my face. But I did not do that for long. Although I liked the idea of a rigid order, and seemed to believe that a thing would have more value if it was part of an order, I quickly became tired of the order.
Even without a spot of alone time this is how I manage, creating little whirlpools of systems for myself that I can then fall into, swimming along the edge until the obligation pulls me into its center. I suppose this is one reality of the situation, that I create little puzzle-paths for living only to get bored of them, as the narrator does in the wake of her bad breakup. The difference between us: Instead of writing myself into a book, say, or something else with slightly more complexity, I instead write myself straight into a corner of the internet that most people will not see, and that in some way has hardly any rules, no real beginning or end, except the things I decidedly impose when I’m restless. 🐁