Review: Can’t and Won’t - Lydia Davis

Guest Review by Jayne White

At the time I sat down to write this review, the book had received just one review on amazon.co.uk - a one star dismissal. “It is a very badly written book. I don't understand how the author could receive so many good reviews.” Indeed the book has received good reviews from professional critics, as one would expect from a recent winner of the Man Booker International prize. It’s going to get a good review from me too, although I do have a bit of sympathy for the Amazon reviewer who has chosen a book that’s very wrong for him. This is a short story anthology in which many of the ‘stories’ fall outside our conventional understanding of stories.

In my dim and distant student days I wrote my dissertation on developing a ‘sense of story’ in young children. Although we’re surrounded by story as we grow up, the ability to tell them isn’t something that comes to us spontaneously; it comes from the developing child being gently and repeatedly nudged into clearer and fuller communication by parents and other family members with more advanced language skills. The child is questioned for more detail and encouraged to sequence their thoughts until eventually they learn to construct their narrative in such a way as to make sense to the person who is listening to them. As the child grows up this skill is then formalised, with the help of teachers, into written narratives.

I worked as a primary school teacher for several years and this gave me ample opportunity to observe the stages that children go through when they develop into writers. There’s one stage that children often stall at where they can establish the scene of a story, but fail to launch into an account of events. Lots of the stories in this anthology are recreations of that stage. Many of the stories are very short; a fair proportion of them are just one or two sentences long. Now if a child in my class were to give me this, I’d be trying to brainstorm it with them to help them see how they could develop it into a conventional story; however, what can you do with it when you find it in a printed book? Well, I think the first option is that taken by the bemused Amazon reviewer I’ve quoted above. These days disgruntled readers have a very public forum to air any dissatisfaction with their purchase. My reaction is different; I look at these fragments of story and start to consider them in the light of my own experience and the recollections that they trigger. Obviously some fragments trigger more of a reaction than others. The ones which appeal to me might not be the same ones which appeal to you. It’s not too much of a stretch to think of them as poems or meditations rather than stories. These stories can’t be read passively; they’re not the just the words on the page; they stand or fall by your engagement with them. Take for example the story Can’t and Won’t from which the book takes its title:

“I was recently denied a writing prize because, they said, I was lazy. What they meant by lazy was that I used too many contractions: for instance, I would not write out in full the words cannot and will not, but instead contracted them to can’t and won’t.”

That’s not an extract, by the way - that’s all that’s written. Now for you this might not have any resonance at all, but in my head, I’m thinking about:

●     being taught contractions at school;

●     teaching contractions at school;

●     how irritating it was to read George Bernard Shaw scripts when he wouldn’t use apostrophes;

●     how infrequently contractions appear in other stories in this collection;

●     how other people can be arseholes about language and grammar;

●     clashes I’ve had with former colleagues over devising style guides as a web consultant;

●     should I think about entering for a prize myself?

●     how easily people have failed to recognise my genius in the past;

●     how I complained to HR about the misuse of temporal apostrophes in my recent redundancy paperwork…

I’m going to stop there because this is a book review and not some covert form of therapy, but I hope I’ve made my point. If I needed any validation about the way I was reading the stories I think I got it when Roland Barthes popped up as a character in one of the stories reminding me that 20 years on from my student days I really ought to sharpen up my recollections of critical theory.

Not all the stories in the book are of the one or two sentence type although most would fall within the flash fiction limit of 250 words. There are a number of stories based on incidents referred to in Flaubert’s letters: the author is also noted for her translation work. A lot of stories are based on dreams. There are several which are letters of complaint. There are recurring themes such as pedanticism, the difficulties of making the right choice, difficult family dynamics, making connections in crowded places and also the writing process itself.

If I were reviewing this book on Amazon I’d be giving it 5 stars. That’s not based on the usual criteria for judging a book - plot, character, dialogue - in fact nearly everything I cover when I teach Creative Writing courses as community education. It’s based on the fact that writing is based on communication and being as my participation in this fragmented communication has helped me to know myself better.