"Davis is an author who takes nothing for granted, even the form of the writing itself. Can a sentence be more than a sentence? How does experience reveal itself? These questions have been at the heart of Davis'' career from the outset . ''Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work, Flaubert famously cautioned, and the sentiment applies to Can''t and Won''t . At the center of the book is the understanding that we can locate stories anywhere, that the most regular and orderly moments are, in fact, the most violent and original, that it is up to us to notice, to re-create, to preserve . In many ways, Can''t and Won''t is like a set of William Burroughs cut-ups, random moments juxtaposed, one against the other, until reality takes on the logic of a collage. Unlike Burroughs, though, Davis'' intent is not to rub out the word. Rather, language is what gives shape to the chaos, allowing us to invest existence with a shape. That this shape is of our making, our invention is the point precisely.
" -- David Ulin, The Los Angeles Times "Some writers have the uncanny ability to slant your experiences. Read enough Lydia Davis and her stories start happening to you . Her stories have a way of affecting the sense so that indecision itself becomes drama and a mutual shrug between two strangers can take on more meaning. This is what the best and most original literature can do: make us more acutely aware of life on and off the page. To read Davis is to become a co-conspirator in her way of existing in the world, perplexity combined with vivid observation. Our most routine habits can suddenly feel radically new . Her work, which often consists of brief stories made up of seemingly mundane observations, resists classification and is especially immune to explanatory jibber-jabber. In a universe drowning in words, Davis is a respite .
What she doesn''t say is as important as what she does . She ignores any and all cramped notions about what is and is not a story, and her work has always freed up reads to conjure their own lasting, offbeat visions . Call Lydia Davis the patron saint of befuddled reality . Davis''s books more fully mirror (and refract) the chaos of existence than safer, duller, more homogenous collections precisely because the stories aren''t consistent in tone, subject matter, length, depth or anything else. Neither are we consistent. One moment you can''t decide where to sit on a train, the next you find yourself staring squarely into the abyss. What Davis is attempting to express is the wild divergence of human experience, how the ordinary and the profound not only coexist but depend on each other . Can''t and Won''t is a more mournful and somber book than previous Davis collections.
Calamity and ruin are always close at hand . Still, the wonky comedy remains, as does the knife-thrust prose, as does the exuberant invention . Random beauty, too, is everywhere . It is as if Davis means to remind us that only close, intense observation can save us, and only for the time being." -- Peter Orner, The New York Times Book Review " Can''t and Won''t is the most revolutionary collection of stories by an American in twenty-five years. Here, indeed, are objects in all their eerie mystery--knapsacks, nametags, rugs, frozen peas--vibrating with possibility; but here, too, is consciousness dramatized in a truly new way, behaving with the stubborn inertia of those very same objects . No story writer alive has put sentences under so much pressure, so well, so consistently. In dealing with mortality, though, Davis''s observational gaze has acquired a new warmth and depth .
The difference between the words can''t and won''t is created by the mind. One is inability; the other is willed refusal -- but how often are they confused? Consciousness, these stories show, so often pivots between these poles on the axis of this confusion. The genius of Can''t and Won''t is that Davis has created a narrative out of that oscillation. Here is a mind rubbing up against the world, with fascination and wonder and disgust. It judges and it observes. Davis writes in sentences as radically lucid as any penned by Grace Paley, who was, in her lifetime, too often belittled as a miniaturist. What is tiny--like a molecule of oxygen--allows us to breath, as these stories do with their fabulous, occult integrity." -- John Freeman, The Boston Globe "Lydia Davis''s short-story collections tend to exceed the boundaries of a single book and become libraries .
Whatever its source, Davis''s range is all the more impressive for reading as a series of natural progressions . Come to this one-book library for the mercurial gifts of its author; stay because the stories continually renew their invitation to be read inventively." -- Helen Oyeyemi, The Guardian "Davis''s curtest works have a lot in common with poetry: this poised, metaphysical jest about time, death and language owes a debt to its line endings. Yet even at her most poetic Davis is a storyteller, even if her plots unfold with the quiet philosophical precision of a Samuel Beckett ''fizzle'' or theatrical monologue . when her genius for syntax is married to genuine emotion, then the results can be truly astonishing. In Can''t and Won''t, these emotions wheel ominously around death. ''The Dog Hair'' is both touching elegy for a deceased pet and surrealist joke that captures the futile yearning that accompanies grief. The knowing reserve of ''A Story Told to Me by A Friend'' explores how language creates love and, by extension, sorrow, how intimacy overcomes distance, and how distance gets in the way.
The most memorable of all is ''The Child,'' which almost shocks with its dispassionate snapshot of a bereaved mother and a profound melancholy that beggars belief. Incorporated elegantly into this extraordinary five-line work are questions about art''s capacity to fix such sadness. The final whispered command, ''Don''t move,'' resounds endlessly. As so often in Lydia Davis, the less said, the better." -- James Kidd, The Independent "Unlike most American writers receiving international prizes, [Lydia Davis] . tend[s] to focus on very short stories, but they might be better described as succinct, exploding the accreted clichés of literary fiction, until so much of that intricate plotting, deft characterization, etc., seems to be futile marketing copy . Her new collection Can''t and Won''t makes use of extreme brevity .
often to bracket deadpan jokes, tight little bows that unravel in your hands . neat simplicity is less façade than grist. Like Raymond Queneau''s Exercises in Style , the twin variations of ''Reversible Story'' become more striking for their absence of incident . And ''Men'' demonstrates that, despite Davis''s wry restraint, her prose can still trot into flight." -- Chris Randall, The National Post "So many of [Lydia Davis''s] stories reflect paying attention to what is around us, to things we normally ignore . Her subjects are often mundane: lost socks, dog hair, cooked cornmeal. Yet they leave a resonance that makes us think again about the experiences that fill our lives but that we fail to think about . Because they are so tightly written and are usually so brief, [Davis''s stories] demand that we think about them and reflect on what they may want to say to us.
" -- Gordon Houser, The Wichita Eagle "Remarkably, it is often the stories that take up the least space on the pages of Can''t and Won''t that deliver the most emotion and are the most stylistically interesting . Across all of her stories, Davis uses words sparingly, resulting in prose that is never flowery and narration that keeps its distance from the reader. We are watching these characters and listening to them rather than being intimately invited into their lives. Davis writes grief subtly and beautifully in this collection . Can''t and Won''t is never more sad, more mundane, or more tragic than reality, and yet it is still striking that Davis creates such visceral depictions in her stories. The collection is a strong example of Davis''s work and a worthwhile read, with content, form, and style that provoke thought and capture reality--usually in less than one page." -- Cecilia Paasche, The Swarthmore Phoenix "Ezra Pound famously exhorted the artist to ''make it new,'' a directive on the one hand incontestable and, on the other, dangerously difficult. Lydia Davis is that rare writer whose work enacts the injunction: the dramas and ironies of her short--often very short--stories are those of our everyday lives, held up before us as if for the first time.
The effect is rather like that of saying the same word over and over until it becomes alien, a new and strange thing: our relation to dog hair, to a piece of fish or a bag of frozen peas, or to an unsolicited invitation in the mail--any of these can provide an occasion for the world to shift, however slightly, upon its axis. High quality global journalism requires investment. It''s possible to make any number of statements about Davis''s fiction: that her stories are idiosyncratic, unmistakably Davisian; that she combines what might, in others, resemble whimsy with a bracingly unsentimental clarity of observation; that she shows a flagrant--and inspiring--disregard for rules or obligations (no teacherly insistence here upon what a story ought to be, upon its structure or requirements), and an almost philosophical openness to the objet trouvé that runs, like a surrealist thread, through her new collection of stories. All of these statements are true, and yet none can truly convey the first thing about her work, which is sui generis . Davis''s signal gift is to.