Masterpieces of brevity in a short story collection

Can't and Won't
by Lydia Davis 
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
4 stars

There is a story early in Can't and Won't, Lydia Davis' first major publication since winning 2013's Man Booker International Prize, called The Bad Novel. If any explanation is needed about what Davis does, and why it is frequently so startling, then this may just do it.

Characteristically, the work is short enough (four and a half lines in total) to quote in full: "This dull difficult novel I have brought with me on my trip - I keep trying to read it. I have gone back to it so many times, each time dreading it and each time finding it no better than the last time, that by now it has become something of an old friend. My old friend the bad novel."

This is a "fizzle", to use Samuel Beckett's lovely word, in praise of "fizzles". The breezy brevity of Davis' prose, all lightness, clarity and speed, contrasts with the "dull, difficult" titular Bad Novel (or so the narrator lets us imagine).

Where the subject is a seemingly unreadable work of fiction, the content is almost impossible not to finish. Even the laziest, most harried reader can cope with this 59-word masterpiece. And yet, thanks to that pleasingly unexpected twist near the tail ("it has become something of an old friend"), what seems like an assault on the tedium of challenging, experimental long-form fiction becomes an ode to the strange joys of longevity: how unhappiness of a sort can, though sheer bloody-minded endurance, come oddly close to fondness and, possibly, love.

Davis is something of a genius at twisting such ideas around her little finger, like a precocious child twirling her hair into odd shapes. There is wit, humour and a strange beauty in her compressed concentration of the short story. Take Her Birthday, for instance, whose beginning, middle and end is far easier to quote than explain: "105 years old:/She wouldn't be alive today/Even if she hadn't died." This, like many of Davis' curtest works, has a lot in common with poetry: this poised, metaphysical jest about time, death and language owes a debt to its line endings, and plays longitude (those 105 years) off its concision (those three short lines).

Even at her most poetic, however, Davis is a storyteller, albeit one whose plots unfold with the quiet, philosophical precision of a Borges story. In the strangely thrilling anti-drama of The Two Davises and the Rug, two people named "Davis" wonder, respectively, whether to buy and sell a "brightly patterned wool rug". The narrative exalts pedantry to existential levels as the protagonists fret over ideas of ownership, intention, uncertainty, economics, aesthetics and even adoration in four and a half pages. This story feels positively epic compared to many in Can't and Won't, the first book to be published after Davis became famous, or very nearly, thanks to her Man Booker International win (awarded every two years for "an achievement in fiction on the world stage") and 2009's already defunct The Collected Stories.

A classic Davis squib is stripped of specific historical or geographical context, making one wonder how personal all this writing is. Her simple but finely modulated sentences measure mental or emotional attitudes to situations odd or specifically mundane.