Having finished Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen, my haphazard reading habits have caused me to pick up The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, which more than caffeine has aroused my nervous system during midmorning, work-day coffee breaks. Davis's "fictions" have been called crosses between stories, prose poems, and philosophic aphorisms. In an interview, she has said that she likes Beckett for "the plain, Anglo-Saxon vocabulary; the intelligence; the challenge to my intelligence; the humor that undercut what might have been a heavy message; and the self-consciousness about language." These are characteristics that one recognizes in Davis's work, too. And another one that she did not mention, the bleak outlook.
In a story called "Glenn Gould," the narrator, a stay-at-home mother, makes a point of watching "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" whenever possible. It seems odd that one of my favorite TV shows plays a part in the last two books I've read. Franzen's teen-aged Patty Emerson, watching at her home in Westchester County, New York, is by way of this show introduced to my hometown of Minneapolis, and to escape her affluent but damaged family of origin she accepts an athletic scholarship to the University of Minnesota. Davis's character, describing the attractions of the show, says: "I want to stay in that other place, that other city that is a real city but one I have never visited."
One feels that the language, here and almost everywhere in Davis's work, is charged and allusive. The "other place," "that other city that is a real city but one I have never visited," is not really or just Minneapolis, Minnesota. It's where sane, grounded, decent, intelligent, mostly contented Mary Richards, the character played by Mary Tyler Moore, makes her home. That's the place the narrator hasn't been. She gives the impression that she regards "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" as a guilty pleasure and is therefore pleased to learn, in a letter from her friend Mitch, that Glenn Gould, the great pianist she admires, is also a fan. In the course of the brief story (though, at nine pages, it's one of Davis's longer ones), some of the pianist's characteristics are mentioned, and the movement is from the elevated ("intelligent," "high standards," "articulate") to the ominous ("hypochondriac," "excessively careful of his hands," "was fond of a certain rather ugly female pop singer"). Also, there is this:
Glenn Gould did not have children. He was not married.
The narrator is married and has a child. There is nothing in the story to indicate that either is a source of much satisfaction. The husband is barely in the story. When they eat dinner, they sometimes have little to talk about, so she will tell him about something funny from the last episode. Then, "I can see that he is ready to laugh even before I tell it, though so often, in the case of other subjects, he is not terribly interested in what I say to him, especially when he sees that I am becoming enthusiastic."
The sentence proceeds, clause by clause, to that final one: especially when he sees that I am becoming enthusiastic. That is all there is about the husband. Her friend who tells her that Glenn Gould watches "Mary Tyler Moore" is Mitch but the husband is not named. One of the things the narrator mentions about Glenn Gould is that he "was able to be selfish without hurting anyone." To the narrator, it seems like a trait worth mentioning.
Comments