Samuel Johnson Is Indignant
by Lydia Davis
McSweeney's Books

It's hard to know what to call the pieces collected in Lydia Davis' "Samuel Johnson Is Indignant." Are they poems or are they stories? Someone, author or publisher, has opted for the latter, but it's probably better to say that the pieces collected here are neither. Better still to say that the pieces collected here, and the inventive author who wrought them, demonstrate the limitations of the extant terminology and, miraculously, do so while entertaining and delighting readers.

It would be fair to say that Davis is an experimental writer, though it feels odd to say anything about this writer who consistently uncovers the frailties or oddities of language itself, but experimentalism connotes ponderousness, absurdity, obscurity. Davis' work is none of these things. Her diction is crisp and meticulous without feeling calculated or chilly. Her more narrative works follow plots that are clearly comprehensible and often quite sweet. Her references, whether musical or literary or relating to any of the other aspects of the culture in which Davis is seemingly so well versed, aren't particularly arcane and even when they are don't feel contrived for the sake of being "difficult." What's most experimental about Davis' writing is how easily it goes down.

This collection, Davis' third (she has also published a novel, "The End of the Story," required reading after any big break-up), contains fifty-six pieces, some of them long and involved narratives, some of them pithy epigrams that are, perhaps counter-intuitively, no less rewarding. Of the longer pieces, "Jury Duty" and "Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman" are the loveliest, synthesizing Davis' experimental leaning with interesting narratives. "Jury Duty" takes the form of a question and answer session, and is in fact written in the strict Q&A format, but after each "Q" there is only space — the questions are implied only in the answers, the result a lucid narrative about one narrator's experience when she is called to jury duty. "Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman" accomplishes a similar formal trick, compressing Curie's life into a series of brief paragraphs on various aspects of her life enumerated under grand section titles. The result reads like a biographer's outline for a book yet to be written, but this document itself evokes a narrative in and of itself.

Of the shorter pieces here, some are worthy just for their linguistic acrobatics, such as "Mown Lawn," which is one of the more explicitly poem-like pieces in the book and in which the protagonist (if this is what we are to call Davis' various "she's" and "he's") muses about the sound of the words "mown lawn." But more winning still are pieces like "A Double Negative," "How Difficult," or "Money," which suggest, sometimes in as few as 39 words, a novel's worth of meaning and action.

There are, among the many pieces here collected, some which are less successful than the rest, but it's not an uneven collection and is in fact more suited to being read cover to cover than most collections, whether of stories or poems. With a title as compelling as "Samuel Johnson is Indignant," some readers might just pick the book up to examine what, exactly, such a book could possibly be about. Oddly enough, the answer is not to be found in these pages. This fact alone makes the book well worth reading.

— Rumaan Alam (rumaanalam@hotmail.com)