Something spooky happened as I was reading The End of the Story by Lydia Davis. I read the author blurb on the back cover flap and it said she lived with her husband in upstate New York. I still felt psychically edgy and punched her into Wiki and there she was, a professor of creative writing at SUNY Albany.
Not that any local color comes through in the story, which appears to take place somewhere around San Francisco and eventually looking back to the West Coast from a more northern climate, like Vermont or Minnesota. Everything is intentionally vague and circuitous in the story. Both lovers are unnamed and not physically described except for their age difference: she is twelve years older, a professor at the school he attends, or not. Their affair is brief, maybe lusty but not written with any voyeurism.
Davis writes about writing. She is stretching stream of consciousness into something like a river of forgetfulness. Paragraphs are Joycean in length and sentence complexity with all possible, if unlikely or unreal, outcomes are arrayed. Davis pokes holes in plot clarity and autobiographical sources in novels. Her main theme is never one like Proust’s where one sensual image recalls feelings with clarity and precision. She writes like a middle aged, pre-Alzheimer’s woman who cannot recall the details or sequence of what she has labeled as one of the more significant loves of her life. The only quote I marked illustrates this "whirlwind" pattern:
"What I remember may be wrong. I have been trying to tell the story as accurately as I can, but I may be mistaken about some of it, and I know I have left things out and added things, both deliberately and accidentally ... many parts of this story are wrong, not only the facts, but also my interpretations. But there was only what I saw ... There are some inconsistencies. I say he was open to me, and I say he was closed to me. I say he was silent with me, and that he was talkative. That he was modest, and arrogant. That I knew him well, and that I did not understand him ... Either all these things were true at different times or I remember them differently depending on my mood."
Her ambiguity makes both the male and female characters seem unattractive. Motives are discernible: he needs a place to crash at night and she, in a
pre-cougar time, likes him around but on a short leash, under her eye and control, and only on her terms.
Davis has also selected a “slightly off” title for the novel. Immediately, she writes of the break up, the end of her love story, but from there on, there is not chronological time line. If she writes all her stories this way, she would be that attention-deficit co-worker one avoids; if she used this as a structured device to seem unstructured, she is masterful. Unfortunately, my local library network only has collections of her short stories, no other novel. Maybe I should head over to the SUNY bookstore and see what’s in the stacks by her. Or maybe not.
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