OUR STRANGERS: Storiesby Lydia Davis
A story of Lydia Davis, as we have come to know it over the course of five decades and seven collections, is a tour de force of omission. Often no longer than a page, sometimes laid out like a poem, it captures an everyday situation with almost all of the context removed, so that, detached from a particular place or time, it appears charismatically strange. “How long is the shadow that comes across the bar from this grain of salt,” Davis writes in “Late Afternoon,” included in her new collection “Our Strangers.” The small and universal image sums up the entire endeavor well.
And yet, in “Our Strangers,” our present fears creep in, despite the quality of isolation that permeates all of Davis’ work. Formatted as a letter to a company that sells recycled toilet paper, the story “Dear Who Gives a C***” mentions an “attitude of brutal indifference that is all too common in the times in which we live.” One story revolves around a repulsive phone call with “a woman who in the end didn’t seem like a real woman or even a real human being.” Another, “How He Changed Over Time,” chronicles the decline of an admirable, learned figure — identified as Thomas Jefferson — into a closeted narcissist. More than one story is about congealed notions of community, and it’s easy to read them as small indictments of contemporary culture. There’s a surprising sense that even Davis might not be entirely immune to doomscrolling.
“Our Strangers,” to be clear, is not a polemical book or even one with a discernible thesis, despite Davis’ request that it be sold only through independent booksellers and Bookshop.org and not through Amazon. What concerns Davis above all is not the open debate, but the meticulous, almost obsessive observation of other people: passengers on trains, guests in Salzburg restaurants, a woman in a Watertown Price Chopper trying to recycle shampoo bottles. The book sometimes seems like a compendium of unusual folk tales.
But as the collection builds, a quiet statement begins to form: Davis seems to be offering a vision of how we might interact with the people around us and what an actual community might look like. The title story catalogs the narrator’s past and present neighbors and the neighbors of the narrator’s friends, as well as the tenor of each of these relationships—resentful, friendly, tense, indifferent. Neighbors become “a kind of family together” through simple proximity, Davis writes.