BOOKS
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Again in "A Few Things Wrong with Me," a woman, puzzled by the
loss of her lover's affection, feels that the things he doesn't like are
probably things she doesn't like about herself either, but which she
can't change , such as not being talkative and using index cards to
make diet plans and plot summaries. She is left obsessed with "a
useless question" that may not even have a "right answer." The
characters in these stories not only fail to connect with each other,
but also with themselves as anything other than sources of an–
noyance or frustration. In "Sketches for a Life of Wassilly ," the pro–
tagonist is described as :
Not a man of habit, though he wished to be , tried to cultivate
habits, was overjoyed when he found something that truly, for a
time , seemed necessary to him and that had possibilities of
becoming a habit.
The loss of instinct or convention, which might order life so that
moments of spontaneous pleasure were possible, blights all of the
lives represented in these stories . The deliberate cultivation of this
uniformity of tone, the search for
Ie mot juste
without any sense of
Ie
grand plan
makes the mundane seem menacing, as in "French Lesson
I," an ingenious monologue which, while introducing a beginner's
vocabulary centered around the daily activities of the farm, suggests
that some act of unwonted violence has left the "feathers stuck in
Ie
sang
on the chopping block outside the back door, smaller feathers,
however, than would be expected from
un poulet."
These and other
questions, perhaps "useless," may be answered in the next lesson, or
they may not.
When observation of the minutia of existence has been per–
fected to the degree Davis achieves in "Cockroaches in Autumn"–
twenty sketches, some no more than a sentence: "They nest in the
coffee filters , in the woven wicker shelves, and in the crack at the top
of a door, where by flashlight you see the forest of moving legs" - one
is witnessing the extreme development of some idea about writing,
some program adhered to by one perhaps fearful of the conse–
quences of a slight error. Davis's excellent work as a translator of
Maurice Blanchot seems to have made her as distrustful of language
as he is , and her knowledge of his literary tradition has been distilled
to curious effect. It is as if the most sophisticated French writers of
