Lydia Davis McNally Books - Review By Tomm McCarthy

Someone tells me that they have never seen McNally Jackson books this crowded. Lydia Davis is reading downstairs with Lynne Tillman and somebody has never seen this little bookstore this crowded.

We make our way through the crowd. Just moving to the basement is a struggle. Folks a sitting on the steps at first, then even the stairs are standing room only. Then we push through to the children’s section, but, besides being so tight that feet can’t be seen, we also can’t see the stage behind a shelf where books on Clifford the Big Red Dog would be were he still sold here.

So its on to sci-fi. People grumble as in passing they are shoved. But there is room next to the fantasy, and next to the romance, even a recliner (which is already taken) and we can see the stage between one bookshelf and another. But our spot is cemented in another way, the show is starting.

First comes Lynn Tillman who is honored to be reading again with her friend Lydia Davis and at such an esteemed time as the paperback release of her book of ultra-short stories can’t and won’t no less. But she doesn’t wish to take too much of our time and begins her reading.

She reads three stories: the first is the story of a time that she silently rescued a bird for a father and his daughter. There is no dialogue by any characters besides the character named “I” who has two lines “Grab that bird!” and “Here’s the bird.” But that’s what’s striking about it, and, it points this out, that silence of those people with whom the bird were involved with and even the bird itself were all silent throughout the episode. The second is a story which is harder to follow, in which Tillman was asked to write a sci-fi story, but couldn’t really figure out how to (here I looked around the section in which I’d found myself). In order to overcome this block, she invented a sort of Future-English. The futurness of this language made its plot hard to follow, but it was rather enjoyable to listen to. Her final story was about her taking a bus ride because “people didn’t know what to do with their freedom” and for no other reason. At many points, her first person character told her audience that she could have done something different, because she was free to do anything, but didn’t because she made the choice not to.

Lydia Davis only reads a few stories from her can’t and won’t because she has had a long winter upstate and wrote many more flash fictions. She wants to read these more. Her stories range from very funny, like her story “I Ask Mary About Her Friend, the Depressive, and His Vacation” which is simply “‘One year she says, “He’s away in the Badlands.” The next year she says, “He’s away in the Black Hills.”’” to extremely sad, like her story about the depressed Christmas tree, in which an old woman believe the Christmas tree is sad because she wants to get married. But for all of these stories, Davis’s voice quivers a little, like even her funny jokes are serious and subtly sad, like we in the audience just can’t see that. Then she’ll laugh with us, because we’re laughing. She might as well.