The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Samuel Johnson Is Indignant: Stories by Lydia DavisTrey Strecker
Lydia Davis. Samuel Johnson Is Indignant: Stories. McSweeney’s, 2001. 201 pp. $17.00.
In her latest collection, the author of Break It Down (1986) and Almost No Memory (1997) delivers fifty-six scintillating stories that showcase her almost tactile love of language in sentences reminiscent of Baudelaire’s prose poems or Kafka’s fables. If these diverse tales share a subject, it is the difficulty of communication and the modern impulse to objectify other individuals. Davis’s stories—some as brief as a single elliptical sentence—do not depend upon verbal pyrotechnics; rather, her stories are quiet and introspective, nuanced meditations of minimalist precision that flower into complexity and urge the reader to see anew. Even in a short review, there can be no substitute for the texture of her beautiful sentences: “Because they were fantasies she had alone, at night, they continued to feel like some sort of betrayal, and perhaps, because approached in this spirit of betrayal, as perhaps they had to be, to be any comfort and strength, continued to be, in fact, a sort of betrayal”; “It is certainly true that the larger and older the living thing is, the harder it is to know how to care for it”; and, “The useful thing about being a selfish person is that when your children get hurt you don’t mind so much because you yourself are all right.” Whether writing about marital infidelity and memory or lawn mowers and jury duty, Davis’s contemplative, poetic prose and her deft characterization brilliantly underscore the subtleties of modern life, subjectivity, and conscience. These are stories meant to be savored. [Trey Strecker]