Lydia Davis writes in straightforward, elegant sentences about people whose thoughts are not straightforward at all. With gentle yet penetrating insight, she illuminates characters who are worried, puzzled about how to live their lives, not sure what to believe. They are drawn in by false notions, imagine nonexistent dangers, read philosophy but fail to understand it. The combination of their imperfect thinking and Davis’s flawless prose is touching; it can also be extremely funny.

Most of the stories in “Bezoek aan haar man” are very short: a few pages long, or a paragraph, or one sentence. Although they seldom have an actual plot, they are often concerned with stories and storytelling: she is interested in the effect that narratives have on people’s lives.

In “The Professor,” a woman who teaches English sees a romantic movie and starts wishing she could marry a cowboy. “I was tired of thinking, which was what I did most in those days. […] I might feel something, but I would think about what I was feeling at the same time. […] I imagined that maybe a cowboy would help me stop thinking so much.” She daydreams about running a motel in the desert and falling in love with the cowboy when he comes to stay. “I had that strange confidence, born of watching a good movie, that I could be something different from what I was, and I started listening to country-western music on the car radio, though I knew it wasn’t written for me.”

In “The Bone” a woman describes an incident that happened years before: she served her husband fish for dinner and a bone got caught in his throat. He and she went together to the hospital, where a doctor took it out. Later they divorced. On the rare occasions when they see each other, they still bring up the night of the fishbone. The story itself has become stuck in their throats, a small, tickly scrap of a marriage long ago consumed.

Lydia Davis’s own first husband was Paul Auster, a fact that stimulates curiosity. They were together for 13 years, collaborated on French translations, and have a son. Was he the model for the man with the fishbone? Or for the man in the title story, who meets his wife to discuss their divorce? Like Auster, Davis is a minimalist with a distinctive style. But where Auster is mysterious and abstract, Davis often looks for meaning in domestic detail: sounds from outside an apartment window, the furniture in a room. As a result, her stories are calm even when the people in them are desperate.

In “What Was Interesting,” a writer is trying to describe a moment in which her boyfriend was rude to her. Although she is furious, she can’t seem to make the event sound important, and she wonders why. The result is both an account of deep emotional pain and a subtle inquiry into how love stories create their effect. Likewise, “French Lesson I: Le Meurtre” examines the building blocks of stories. Here, Davis takes words from an elementary French lesson—le poulet, le fermier, la femme—and uses them to construct a mysterious crime thriller.

It took a while for Davis’s star to rise. She is the author of one novel, “The End of the Story” (1995), and the winner of various lesser-known literary prizes, but it has only been in the past ten years, and especially after her “Collected Stories” were published in 2009, that she won widespread critical recognition. (“Bezoek aan haar man,” her first Dutch publication, contains the first half of that collection, in an excellent translation by Peter Bergsma.) She has also translated some 30 books from French to English, including Sartre and Simenon (together with Auster), and more recently Proust and “Madame Bovary.”

Although she’s an experimental writer, she’s not an intimidating one; her brief observations are both intellectual and gently self-mocking. It’s easy to recognize oneself in a story like “A Few Things Wrong with Me,” in which a man calls a woman to end their relationship. When she asks him why, he tells her that there are things about her that bothered him from the beginning. Inevitably, she can’t stop wondering what they are, “a useless question, really, since I’m not the one who can answer it and anyone else who tries will come up with a different answer, though of course all the answers together may add up to the right one, if there is such a thing as a right answer to a question like that.” Seeing that the human condition is absurd, she can only conclude that thinking—and writing—are symptoms, or possibly even causes of the disease.

In “Foucault and Pencil” the narrator describes a failed attempt to read the abstruse philosopher Michel Foucault in French. “Short sentences easier to understand than long ones. Certain long ones understandable part by part, but so long, forgot beginning before reaching end.” It’s comforting to know that one is not the only reader daunted by difficult writing—but Davis is also showing off her own clear thinking. In some ways her stories insist that life can’t be understood, and yet her own power of insight offers hope that it can.

Besides, the idea that uncomfortable experiences—the moments when we realize we are not equal to the demands of life—can also be literature is an encouraging one. In another story, under the heading “I have learned what art really is,” she writes, “Art is not in some far-off place.” Literature is here, in the scraps and bones of life—and in the telling.

Trouw, May 21, 2011. Lydia Davis, Bezoek aan haar man (Amsterdam: Atlas, 2011), Collected Stories (New York: FSG, 2009).

In her nine novels, the American writer Lionel Shriver has never been afraid to show her characters’ dark side. Grimly, and sometimes comically, she explores marriage and family life as sources of powerful, unsettling emotion. In 2005, she won the Orange Prize for “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” told from the point of view of the parent of a teenage school killer. In flashbacks, she shows us a tyrannical son and a mother who never loved him, leaving unresolved the question of which of the two is the monster.

Shriver’s maternal horror story touched a nerve and went on to sell about a million copies worldwide. In her next book she retreated from dark subjects: “The Post-Birthday World” was a romance, though a calculating one, about a woman choosing between a reliable and an attractive man.

In her new book, Shriver again takes the lid off domestic life, writing about the family, not with the delicate eye for marital discontent of a Rachel Cusk, but with the satirical flair of a Martin Amis. “So Much for That” is the story of Shepherd Knacker, a man in his late forties who has spent his life saving money. What he wants to buy with it, he says, is himself: he wants to relocate to a tropical paradise where he can live on almost nothing. He calls this plan the Afterlife—which is ironic, because just when he finally buys tickets for himself and his family to an island off the coast of Tanzania, his wife Glynis comes home and tells him she has cancer.

Glynis, an artist, is insured through Shep’s work—and in America’s market economy, Shep’s employer can choose to give him only partial coverage. Her illness is about to wipe out his life savings, and along with them his dream of the Afterlife.

This is the start of a wickedly brilliant book, especially in how it talks about money. We don’t like to think of the family as being part of the economic system, or of family ties as more financial than emotional. Barbara Ehrenreich once called the household the last socialist institution, because it’s the one place where people are still willing to share their toaster and their refrigerator. We like to see money as an instrument, not the essence of ourselves.

But Shriver shows us how monetary exchange can make its way into even the most intimate situations. Every person in this novel has a cash value, from a call girl to a woman dying of cancer. And everyone is defined by their relationship to money. Are they givers of money or takers of it? Do they feel more secure when they’re paying or when they’re being paid for?

If even life and death have become fiscal transactions, maybe it’s no surprise that American rebellion focuses on taxes. Shep’s best friend, Jackson, adds political commentary with his cranky assaults on various aspects of the System, claiming that the world is divided into “Patsies and Parasites, Saps and Spongers, Mugs and Moochers.” Then there’s Shep’s whiny sister, a critically successful but chronically broke documentary filmmaker who is “starting to look less like a gifted woman sacrificing for her work, and more like a failure.” (The character, Shriver says, is based on herself before she achieved commercial success.)

The book never quite becomes sentimental, partly because the characters are all so stubbornly opinionated. Glynis refuses to become less difficult as she suffers. When her sister remarks cautiously that illness doesn’t always bring out the best in people, she replies, “But maybe the best in me, for me, isn’t the best in me for you. Maybe the best in me, for me, is that I’m spiteful and vindictive and wish deadly diseases on everyone.”

During a reading in Amsterdam, Shriver said that she began the book after one of her best friends died of cancer. The treatment cost $2 million and extended her friend’s life perhaps three months. (The courageous and optimistic “battle against cancer” is another American commonplace that Shriver tears to shreds.) Then she read in the paper that the most common cause of personal bankruptcy in the US was not the mortgage crisis, but hospital bills.

By the end, Shriver afflicts her characters with not one but three different deadly diseases, plus personal bankruptcy and a penis enlargement operation gone wrong. Meanwhile, the book that begins as a critique of American health care has become something much more. Ultimately, it’s a moving exploration of big themes, from the eternal—death and taxes—to the existential: the purpose of work; the bonds of families; the power of married love, the way we cope, or fail to cope, with death. Shriver doesn’t like to say what you expect. Instead, her powerful intellect and her sensitivity show on every page, from the ominous start to the surprisingly redemptive ending.

Moral discomfort
Minister’s daughter Lionel Shriver (North Carolina, USA, 1957) has been described as “ferociously intelligent, uncompromising, independent, contrary, passionate, and scorchingly funny.” Born Margaret Ann, she felt “alienated” from her name and switched to Lionel at 15. Her novels deal with politics, morality, and the problem of taking the clean knife of ethics to the soup of everyday life. “I like to craft characters who are hard to love,” she says. “I use my characters to examine aspects of myself of which I’m suspicious, or with which I’m not terribly comfortable.” Thus she wrote her best-known book, “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” when she herself was wondering if she should try to have a child: what if she had one she didn’t like? Though her books are often set in America, Shriver spent 12 years reporting from Belfast and now lives with her husband in London.

Trouw, December 18, 2010. So Much for That by Lionel Shriver (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).

Alice Neel (1900–1984) was the most independent-minded painter in New York, “a grande, if often rude, dame” who turned her back on the art world to plant her flag in the neglected genre of portraiture. By the time her career took off in the 1960s, this ultimate bohemian had worked for the WPA, lived on welfare, had many lovers and four children—one died, one was confiscated by her in-laws—and never ceased painting with uncanny psychological insight. Her wordy, misspelling-ridden bio needed a much better edit than it got. Still, Neel’s fascinatingly contradictory, gloriously stubborn character shines through.

From The Village Voice, “The Best Books of 2010.”

Has the sexual revolution, on balance, been a good thing? Rather than freeing us, sexual liberation seems to have subjected our sex lives to the laws of the consumer economy: unequally distributed resources, cycles of feast and famine, competitiveness, acquisitiveness (are other people getting more?). Is sex on the free market really what we wanted? Who’s getting rich under this system, and who’s becoming poor?

Keith, for one, the main character in Martin Amis’s clever, satirical, only partly successful new novel, “The Pregnant Widow.” Keith was born in the same year as Amis, 1949, and resembles him in other ways, too, such as his sensitivity about his height. (Like Amis he occupies “that much-disputed territory between five-foot-six and five-foot-seven”). This leads us to believe that all the power of Amis’s surely considerable experience with sex is going into this tale. He must know what he’s saying when he tells us, on page one, that Keith, a foot soldier in the sexual revolution, is about to become a casualty, that he will suffer a pleasurable “trauma” that will “ruin him for twenty-five years.”

It’s the summer of 1970. Keith is twenty years old and sleeping with a fellow student, Lily, whom he thinks he loves. At Lily’s invitation, he has come to Italy, that place of literary sexual awakening, to spend the summer at a castle belonging to the mother of her best friend. Keith, of course, promptly falls in love, or at any rate lust, with the tall, topless-sunbathing best friend, whose name is Scheherazade.

Scheherazade has fabulous breasts, which Keith goes on about at some length. In fact, all Amis’s characters talk a lot about bodies. The assembled group includes a worldly-wise homosexual, a woman with a rich boyfriend and a large backside named Gloria Beautyman, a four-foot-ten-inch lothario, an orphaned, pregnant 12-year-old, and Rita, a redhead whose sexual aggressiveness is the stuff of legend. They all comment on each other’s physical attributes and what’s attractive to whom. Even when he’s reading Jane Austen, Keith finds remarks about bodies. The heroine of “Northanger Abbey” “has big tits. Austen more or less tells you that,” Keith explains to Lily. “When Catherine’s growing up she gets plumper and her figure gains consequence. Consequence—that’s code for big tits.”

Keith is studying English, so in between all this talk about bodies, he’s also reading his way through the English literary canon. He concludes that, from Richardson to the Brontës to Thomas Hardy, the plot always turns on forbidden love and the chastity of women. “It sometimes seemed to Keith that the English novel, at least in its first two or three centuries, asked only one question. Will she fall?…What’ll they write about, he wondered, when all women fall? Well, there’ll be new ways of falling…”

So along with his sharp wit and brilliant social satire, Amis is armed with an entire history of English hormones. And then…nothing happens. For 300 pages, Keith sleeps with Lily and lusts after Scheherazade, and never in all that time does Amis manage to give this theoretically sexy situation an erotic charge.

Nor does he persuade us to care about Keith’s soul. We’re told that Keith is a romantic who is shocked by the new freedom, or at least startled: “Where were the hinderers, the wet blankets,…where was the police?” But in fact, the few shreds of decency Keith has, he seems happy enough to discard. To be honest, Keith is the kind of guy who, if he met me at a party, would blow me off faster than you can say five-foot-eleven. Why should I give him 470 pages’ worth of my sympathy?

Amis seems to be trying to say something serious, rather than just do his usual trick of scoring one-liners at his characters’ expense. We hear a lot of stories about sex occurring elsewhere, and conclusions about society’s future are drawn. “It was already obvious that every hard and demanding adaptation would be falling to the girls,” Keith thinks. “The boys could just go on being boys. It was the girls who had to choose.”

And Lily remarks thoughtfully, about a girl named Pansy who went to bed with Keith because she thought she should, “People doing it when it’s not in their nature. When they don’t want to. It’s worse, isn’t it, than people not doing it when they do.”

But “The Pregnant Widow” only really gets interesting in the last 70 pages, after Keith returns to London. Over the next twenty years, he struggles to reconcile his new-found sexual cool with the realities of love, desire, and marriage—a problem that’s infinitely more interesting than the tale of his Italian summer. There’s also a subplot about his sister Violet, a self-destructive alcoholic addicted to sex with strangers. This is another point where the novel draws from life: Violet is based closely on Amis’s younger sister Sally, who died in 2000 at the age of 46.

In some ways I suspect that Violet is the real story, and that the proper theme of “The Pregnant Widow” is not the sexual revolution at all. The novel fails because Amis himself is still too aloof, too addicted to his generation’s hard-hearted stance, to write about all the non-profit-motive factors that persist in interfering with our liberalized sexual economy—factors like families, marriage, little sisters, and love.

Trouw, September 25, 2010. Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow (London: Jonathan Cape, 2010).

Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel begins in the year 1929, on a tropical island off the coast of Mexico. There, an American boy swims through an underwater cave to find himself in a secret pool in the jungle. There’s a ruined temple there, and in the pool lie the bones of human sacrifice. The underwater passage, he’s told, is called a “lacuna”: “an opening, like a mouth, that swallows things.… It goes into the belly of the world.” It’s a site of death, but also of buried treasure and escape. It is a hole in history.

History, and especially the gaps in the historical record, is the central theme of “The Lacuna.” Like other successful novels in recent years, this brilliantly constructed narrative includes both fictional characters and real people, in this case the colorful Mexican painters Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and their controversial guest, the exiled Communist leader Leon Trotsky.

There to observe them is the American boy, Harrison Shepherd. The shy, bookish son of an American father and a gold-digging Mexican mother, he discovers, as a teenager in Mexico City, Diego Rivera’s murals depicting the history of Mexico. He becomes so fascinated by Rivera and everything he represents—national identity, socialist politics, the power of art—that he takes a job in the artist’s household as a cook. When Trotsky comes, at Rivera’s invitation, to seek asylum in Mexico, Shepherd goes to work for him as a typist.

The story is told in several different voices, pieced together from letters, newspaper articles, the recollections of Shepherd’s own loyal secretary, and especially Shepherd’s diaries. Shepherd hopes that the lies and errors of the public record—the Mexican press claim Rivera eats human flesh, while Trotsky is cast by both the Americans and the Russians as a Communist villain—can be countered, by his private account. He writes “so when nothing is left of us but bones, someone will know where we went.”

Shepherd has a lacuna in his own history as well: he is gay, and keeps his desires painfully hidden. Kahlo sympathizes with his need for secrecy. Lifting her long skirt to reveal her withered, polio-damaged leg, she tells him, “The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know.” Later he himself adds, “The most important part of any story is the missing piece.”

Frida urges Shepherd to “crack open the mute culture” and write a “true history of Mexico.” After Trotsky’s murder in 1940, he does, moving to America and penning two best-selling historical novels about the Aztecs and the Spanish Conquest. His secretary, Violet, warns him to watch out: Americans “don’t like to see ourselves joined hard to the past. We’d as soon take the scissors and cut every ribbon of that.” Eventually, when Shepherd is subjected to investigation for Communist activity, he too becomes a human sacrifice, his career and life offered up to Americans’ sense of security.
Kingsolver plays masterfully with the recurring themes of unknown truths, modernity versus tradition, dual nationality, the liberating potential of artistic expression. She also comments sharply on current events, as when she has Trotsky remark that people “want to believe in heroes…And villains. Especially when very frightened. It’s less taxing than the truth.”

While “The Lacuna” is thematically rich, it’s at times narratively flat. Like many novelists diving into the historical record, Kingsolver comes back loaded down with too much detail. (“The Lacuna” strongly resembles Michael Chabon’s “Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” in its time period, political concerns, naïve, gay central character, and excessive length.) Besides, the lonely, improbably innocent Shepherd is too much of a lacuna himself to carry the book emotionally. To turn upsetting, enraging real events into thoughtful, skillfully constructed fiction, Kingsolver has deliberately taken a step back from her material. My feeling is that she’s stepped back a little too far.

Trouw, July 24, 2010. The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver (New York: Harper, 2009).

Sara Maitland doesn’t grow her own vegetables; she doesn’t knit; she wouldn’t want to do without central heating. She smokes. She spent all her life to the age of 50 talking, first as a member of a large and noisy family, then as a writer, lecturer, and activist living in London. She’s not the sort of person you’d expect to go in for radical solitude.

But to Maitland, as she explains in her intelligent and engaging “A Book of Silence,” solitude is not primarily an escape from the hectic pace of modern life. It’s an adventure and a challenge: how far can she go? “It was not peace and contentment that I craved,” she writes. Instead, she was after “that awed response to certain phenomena of the ‘natural’ world in which words, and even normal emotional reactions, fail or rather step away from the experience and there is a silence that is powerful, harsh and essentially inhumane. […] I discovered in myself a longing for the sublime.”

Maitland (1950) is a well-known British writer whose books include novels, short stories, an oral history of the 1960s, and works of feminist theology. Born into a wealthy family and raised in London and Scotland, she studied at Oxford, where one of her fellow students, the later American president Bill Clinton, introduced her to feminism when he took her to hear Germaine Greer. She married an Anglican vicar and had two children.

In the early 1990s, Maitland’s life began to change. Her children left home. Her marriage broke up. She began having trouble writing fiction. She moved from London to a village in the country; she converted to Catholicism. Living alone for the first time, she found herself becoming more interested in the act of prayer. She began to perform a kind of contemplative meditation that she saw as a way of “trying to empty one’s mind of its egotistical concerns in an attempt to align oneself with reality.” She felt that silence was helping her to see things as they were.

Being alone was such a revelation to her that she decided to see what would happen if she spent less time with other people, unplugged the phone and Internet connection (at least a day or two a week), and began actively to seek solitude. A friend, playing devil’s advocate, wrote her that silence is “the place of death, of nothingness. […] All silence is waiting to be broken.” But Maitland did not experience silence as a negative condition. Instead, she discovered “a stillness of heart and mind which is not a void but a rich space.”

She decided to try spending a longer period of time on her own. She rented a cottage on the Isle of Skye and spent 40 days and 40 nights there alone, walking, reading, writing and listening for the silence. She found that her senses became intensified, her emotions more powerful. She thought she heard people singing in the sound of the wind. She felt joy, exultation, contentment, and sometimes an “exhilarating sense of peril” that had to do with being close to the emotional edge.

Later, in her own house, she had an enforced experience with silence when a March snowstorm took the phone lines down and trapped her indoors for ten days. Aside from fearing that she would run out of cigarettes, she found herself unnerved. She feared that “the silence was hollowing me out and leaving me empty and naked.” She devotes one chapter in “A Book of Silence” to the dangers of solitude, which include madness and suicide. She reminds us that solitary confinement is also a form of torture.

The book is not all about Maitland’s own experience: she prefers to study other people’s writing on silence, and to offer her erudite observations on various aspects of solitude. She cites polar explorers, solo round-the-world sailors, and idealistic young Chris McCandless, who went alone into the Alaskan wilderness and died. She writes about the Christian hermits who lived on isolated Irish islands in the seventh and eighth centuries. She spares a thought for the loneliness of lighthouse keepers.

She discusses Genesis, in which God creates by speaking, and questions this view of “silence as a lack, something that needs to be broken in order to let in life and meaning.” And why do we call it the “Big Bang,” she wonders, when there was nothing to make a sound?

Eventually, because the asceticism of the early Christian hermits was so important to the development of the Church, she tries spending a week in the Sinai Desert. The trip is surprisingly easy to arrange: she just books a desert meditation package tour. But she’s too much a northerner: the desert is just not her landscape. Nor does she take to Zen meditation or the Quaker custom of silent worship. Instead her search leads her to everyday sorts of contemplation, like birdwatching, which she describes as “paying attention to nothing in the hope that it would at any moment become a bird.”

One disadvantage of silence is that it’s bad for Maitland’s fiction: she can’t pray and come up with stories at the same time. She notes that there’s another kind of silence, too, one embraced by the English Romantic poets: a solitude whose aim was not losing oneself but expressing oneself, strengthening one’s creative individuality. When the two kinds of silence come into conflict, Maitland can’t choose. Nor does she choose complete stillness. At the book’s end, she moves to a lonely house in Scotland, but one with room for guests.

What’s interesting in all these accounts of silence, positive and negative, is how hard it is for humans to go for long periods without speaking to each other. Apparently our brains are built for interaction with others of our species, so much so that only unusual people, under special circumstances, can stand to be alone for any length of time. Maitland doesn’t manage to convince me that the lonely wilderness would be my cup of tea. Still, I enjoyed her dryly humorous description of her attempts at expanding the mind through solitude. “A Book of Silence” is like travel writing for the mental landscape: you can read it with pleasure and interest even if you never plan to visit the country it describes.

Monks, Explorers, and Solo Sailors

“A Book of Silence” mentions a number of people who have spent long periods of time in silence. They include:

Saint Anthony, third-century founder of Christian monasticism, famous for his long isolation in the desert and temptation by demons, often in the form of sexy dancing girls.

Saint Cuthbert, seventh-century English monk who used to “pray all night standing up to his neck in the frigid waters of the North Sea.” When he emerged, “otters would come and warm him with their tongues and fur.”

Thomas Merton, American Trappist, theologian, writer and poet who found in silence a “happiness that is so pure because it is simply not of one’s own making but sheer mercy and gift.”

Augustine Courtauld, a wealthy British adventurer who spent six months in a tent on Greenland in 1930-31.

Bernard Moitessier, French solo sailor who was on course to win a round-the-world competition in 1969 but enjoyed the peace of the sea so much that he gave up the race. Another racer was driven by the solitude to commit suicide.

Tenzin Palmo, a British Buddhist nun who spent three years in silence in the Himalayas. Her only comment was, “Well, it wasn’t boring.”

Trouw, 20 March 2010.

In Atwood’s funniest novel in ages, two women have survived a pandemic, one barricaded in a beauty salon, the other sequestered in an endangered-species-themed strip club. In flashbacks, we learn they’re both members of an environmentalist group called “God’s Gardeners,” which doubles as an ecoterrorist cell. Always a brilliant social satirist, Atwood lovingly parodies Christian idealism—or does she embrace it?—while offering a sneaky feminist take on dystopia: The Road as hen party.

From The Village Voice, “The Best Books of 2009.”