The End of the Story?

How many successful writers published one novel? Some would say Alice Munro, though Lives of Girls and Women is often read as a story cycle marketed as a novel.1 Many disillusioned readers and critics would prefer to remember Harper Lee in this category.2 Emily Brontë, Anna Sewell, and Sylvia Plath, except for the manuscript that disappeared.3 When I Googled "novelists with one novel" the first result cites Memoirs of a Geisha author Arthur Golden as a famous example but also notes that he might be writing another novel at the moment.4 The article also lists Arundhati Roy, so it is already out of date. J. D. Salinger is another. Lydia Davis? Published in 1995, Davis's lone novel The End of the Story — the end of the story, all right. 

As the endnoted twists of the above list attest, we can swiftly disband the one novel club using contextual or conceptual grounds. Sometimes a sole novel doesn't tell us much beyond the fact of the (literal) death of the author that prevented further novels, in the case of Brontë and Sewell, or a death followed by complications with a posthumous second novel, as with Plath.5 Often a single novel in an author's bibliography simply highlights that the author hated the experience of writing it, later returning to the relative comfort of the poetic or short story forms that established their career. Then the trajectory of a novel's reception could repel the prospect of writing another, as is reported for Lee and Salinger; biographers of the latter claim that he "spent ten years writing The Catcher in the Rye and the rest of his life regretting it" for the way its success perpetuated a reading of Salinger-as-Caulfield from which he struggled to extricate himself.6 

In the case of Lydia Davis and The End of the Story, the clues to its status as solo novel are present in its inception. A short story that outgrew its bounds, the novel is about a relationship between a woman and a younger man, now broken up, framed via the narrator who is trying to write about the relationship. The narrator is at first obsessed with the relationship but becomes increasingly distracted, confounded, and stimulated by the challenge of narrating it. The title of the novel reflects this progression, where the referent for "end" is always in question; the relationship is already over at the outset but nonetheless spills into the present tense of writing, while the meta-novel has no end in sight and wobbles at every suggestion of its necessary conclusion. 

While Davis typically approaches her very short stories by "snatch[ing] them out of the air the way certain fish snatch flying bugs," she decided to satisfy her "completist" impulse for once by writing both the story and its telling through to their ends, recording "every possible permutation of feeling and event."7 An example of this is the narrator's rehashing of the evening she first met the man, described three times in succession from the elliptical "my hesitation, his boldness, [...] my house, my room" to the reflexive — "But I'm not sure what to include. There is my hesitation in the café and his persistence."8 Davis describes the motivation for the novel, her longest story, in a way that curiously applies to even her shortest of stories: "I consciously felt that there was nothing that could not be made interesting if it was explored thoroughly enough."9 

Since The End of the Story reflexively narrates the difficult composition of a novel where relationship issues blur with problems of narrative (fidelity, memory, closure), it might reproduce such uncertainty in the minds of its readers — are we reading a novel, a writer's diary, a craft essay meets love story hybrid? Within the novel, the narrator's friend suggests that she could break the novel up and publish its parts as stories (the narrator does not warm to this idea).10 Critics read the novel as variously as "a brilliant essay in the form of a novel," an exploration of the "boundary between fiction and the meditative essay," a "philosophical investigation," and "a novel that doesn't much want to be a novel, that barely is a novel, but can be nothing less."11 At some point in the process, though, the book did switch its story status in favour of the "novel" title, and indeed Davis's many drafts suggest that rather than producing one novel, Davis created several. She began writing "Novel I," a chronological account of the love story, but there soon emerged a clandestine "Novel II" that she wrote in parallel as a diary-like pursuit about the difficulties of writing Novel I.12 Following rewrites and even diagrams to measure the alternations of love story and composition story, the "alive and exciting" Novel II won out and absorbed elements of Novel I to become The End of the Story.13 

The resulting work is a testament to process as story, to the point where the composition story occupies the centre of emotional tension within the novel. The narrator's strife is only occasionally located in retrospective rumination regarding the breakup, such as when she rakes over a personal archive of photographs and letters while she debates whether she's ready to process those memories. The true knot of the novel is the sheer difficulty of writing at every stage: of course the ending, but also how much to share, the vulnerable act of showing work to others, including a man named Vincent who thinks that the narrator should not include any "intimate scenes" or the narrator's "feelings, or most of them."14 Vincent is referring to the romantic content of the novel, but in his wincing feedback he misses the point because the narrator's most intimate reflections are those borne of feeling her way through hundreds of acts of writing. 

The contingent canon of the one novel club and Davis's wavering membership reminds us of what we already know to be true about novels; namely, that they're tricky, fraught with their own processes in ways that are both visible and invisible — or absented — in the final publication. It is common practice to define the novel via notions of process; it turns that which threatens it into fodder for its own persistence. In fact, if we are so inclined, we could tell the story of the literature of the twentieth century through various revolutions in the ways that writers relate to their own creations and the extent to which those relations and processes are made visible in published works — and, once visible, the ways those processes can make themselves felt.15 The writing process can make itself visible and felt via reflexive modes such as metafiction, autofiction, and autotheory that are heavily present across contemporary writing. Process can also be felt when readers' processes of interpretation are anticipated, addressed, or reflected back for their attention through arrangements of form and content.16 Similar to the argument that all language is self-aware or metalingual, it is also possible to state that reflexivity externalises "what is true of all novels".17

Process prevails throughout Davis's work, such as in the reflexive reconciliation of love and/as expenditure in Break it Down's titular story, or stories that feature author-narrators who worry that their work is not sufficiently interesting or that it lacks a centre, such as in "What Was Interesting" and "The Center of the Story."18 The expected emotional cores of Davis's stories are continually displaced to their margins, as in stories like "Letter to a Funeral Parlor" where the reader is not given a story about the loss of a father but rather the narrator's handling of the awkward linguistic blend, "cremains."19 Such reflexivity in varying styles and intensities is often polarising and Davis's strained and sustained exploration of process in her novel did not fare well with some of its readership; those who did not take kindly to its 'meta' lens, the product of a supposed writers' writer.20 This reception is likely attributable to a lingering distaste for anything resembling postmodern metafiction, which has a perennially rocky reception despite the continuance of metanarratives in twenty-first century literary culture.21 Davis's novel also didn't have a straightforward journey through other reading communities, such as in public-facing literary criticism or in scholarship; there are a few journal articles and review essays, but not many.22 

When reflexive deliberation about how to end the novel appears as early as page 11 of the published work, it might well come off as tedious navel-gazing (after all, reflexive textuality is designed for readers to reflect on their own impression of a text). But as a compositional mode of realism, Davis's use of metanarrative is indicative of the ways that the end pre-emptively imposes itself on the process, as it tends to do during the course of a writing project. The end is irresistible, like polishing your acknowledgements page before you've got a full draft of the work for which you're thanking your supporters. The end is also irrepressible, such as when external factors invade upon and temper the status of the work in progress; the often arbitrary end of a grant or contract is like getting cut off mid-sentence.

Davis's narrator anticipates the end for some time. Her worry that money will run out before she is finished manifests as stomach pains.23 She frets that too much time already spent working on the novel isn't a good enough reason to keep persevering with it — "I once stayed with a man too long for the same reason, that there had already been so much between us."24 There is also the sense that the beginning of the relationship contains its own end — as though the air was "already permeated with the end it, as though the walls of that room were already made of the end of it."25 The novel dramatised within The End of the Story is often the object of the narrator's disdain, and she derives "furious pleasure" from deleting whole clumps of it from her draft.26

My answer to the question of why Lydia Davis hasn't published (and probably won't publish) another novel will likely seem obvious to Davis fans — it's the lure of form. She notes that she is motivated above all by the promise of a fresh form: "I'm always led by the possibilities of a form. That's what is exciting to me."27 (This interpretation corresponds with Jonathan Evans's Positioning Lydia Davis.) Connected to this pull of the new, the arc of her career also boils down to the contagious priorities of ongoing and potential future writing — "what happens is that another project comes along that's more compelling, and then another one comes along in front of that that's more compelling."28 This plural method allows Davis to speak in many ways at once, which maps onto her career as a translator; Evans titled his 2016 monograph (the first where Davis is the central focus) The Many Voices of Lydia Davis.29 It seems that Davis quite likes being lots of people at once; she delights in her many selves in "Goodbye Louise, or Who I Am," her ongoing "false autobiography" consisting of mistakes people have made about her over time or instances where she was "addressed unexpectedly," including her name, where and when she was born, where she lives now, her job, and who she might be.30 (In emailing Davis regarding the journal excerpts she gave us for this cluster I was living in fear that an error of mine could pop up in a future iteration of "Goodbye Louise.") 

Rewatching the YouTube recording of her brilliant staccato delivery of "Goodbye Louise" that has the audience laughing with every "Clydia" and "Slydia," — the many alternative Davises — I am reminded of the Google alert for "Lydia Davis" that I set up to catch the odd story she publishes in a small magazine or a new review of Essays Two, but the alert mostly beams reports of other Lydia Davises into my inbox. There's the Lydia Davis who markets kombucha, seemingly successfully because I get roughly one email alert per week about it. And now a few years in I don't have the heart to refine the settings because I've been rooting for gymnast Lydia Davis for so long that she has left and since returned to her sport after breaking her back. Meanwhile, American writer and translator Lydia-Davis-Lydia-Davis moves amidst forms, voices, and selves, is learning to sing, plays piano and violin, and holds a position on her local council board where she explores personal and communal responses to climate crisis.

I'd bet that Davis won't publish another novel, but for several years now she has spoken about a possible second novel that would take the unusual form of a French grammar book. This might resemble an extension of the foreboding story "French Lesson I: Le Meurtre" from Break it Down, where readers learn about the wife of the farmer, who nervously peels potatoes in the kitchen as we progress through the vocabulary for hatchet, handle, anxiety, and murder.31 The novel version would "have a little French in it at the beginning and then more and more and more and more and more so that by the time you were done with the book it would be in French, but you could read it."32 We might never have this novel; in 2016 Davis said that the French grammar novel as an idea was "very old by now" but "still there somewhere on the back burner."33 

So, in the spirit of this cluster's celebration of the breadth of Davis's work, and for a fan's thrill similar to waiting for a musician to release that song they've been name-dropping in interviews, I have gathered tidbits from what Davis has said about ongoing projects that may or may not all find their endings. One thing we know for sure is the archive; the Lydia Davis papers acquired by Columbia University in 2018 are due to be available for visitors in mid-late 2022. There's a case to be made for her archive as another publication, sharing similar concerns to her stories and novel with an emphasis on process and the possibilities of multiple forms. In this archival vein, a significant proportion of Davis's output is and will be based on collecting writing that is mostly already out there, as in the two Essays collections of 2019 and 2021, though Davis edited them substantially.34 Often the hallmark of the successful writer, compilation works make intratextual sense in ways that are particularly suited to Davis's oeuvre, such as the story collections gathered into the Collected Stories that significantly added to Davis's prominence, and the stories from Break it Down that were rewritten into The End of the Story.35 Lastly, ongoing projects in roughly increasing order of likelihood to be published: the French grammar novel,36 an ancestor's memoirs retold as a long prose poem,37 collections of: writing related to climate,38 memoirs,39 recent and new short stories.40 That's without the fresh forms that will invariably present themselves along the way. 

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The end of the story?

"What did not use to happen before: I look at material for a story, I see how it would be worked, I see how it would come out, and what effect it would have, and do not feel compelled to do it. I see it all laid out before me, I see through to the end of it, and I don't know why I should do it, exactly..."41

I have been working on this cluster alongside wrapping up my PhD dissertation and given the shrivelled market for postdocs and jobs it's been hard not to see this project as a swansong for my time in university settings — and therefore my time spent thinking and writing about Lydia Davis. My thesis was about contemporary reflexive writing, works that take account of themselves, and now I understand something of what it means for working conditions and future prospects to weigh so heavily amidst a process that they are a necessary part of that process's actual product. And so this piece has gradually adopted the "I," with this section feeling dauntingly like something I'll keep in, rather than a process-based thought I'd usually delete later. Sometimes a reflexive framing can mimic a kind of freewriting, a way to understand what you're doing and get into it, and then once the piece has got the idea to where it needed to go, you can safely scrub the markers of process from the record. I know that a lot of readers consider reflexivity synonymous with self-indulgence and, honestly, fair enough!42 But Davis shows us that process is story, that the workings of minds that roam are the beginning and the end. I'm losing track of both. Returning to the question of the university and the prospect of writing about Davis, I'm too chicken to name another path (or write my own contribution to the quit lit canon), so I think I'll overstay, and when the time comes I'll leave quietly, by their hand. Either way, I'll be visiting the new Lydia Davis papers at Columbia in September because I received a small grant to do so that expires that same month — which, all told, seems about right. "And since all along there had been too many ends to the story, and since they did not end anything, but only continued something, something not formed into any story, I needed an act of ceremony to end the story."43

At the archive I'll prioritise materials about the novel and the stories, though I'll see translation boxes if I have time, the Blanchot bits especially. 50 years' worth of Davis-Auster correspondence might be embargoed, but I'll enjoy looking through her teaching materials and handling artefacts from The End of the Story. I'll be reminded of how much Davis's work means to me in my capacity as a fan and I'll think of the shared good fortune of our seminar group when my friend Xanthi requested that Davis not be bumped from our MA reading list, bringing us all to her work, our first time reading it. There will also be a moment when something in the archive will provoke the rush of a new idea. There will probably be a kind archivist who will make me think something like "Why are all archivists so kind?" I might daydream about an implausible archive discovery — "Competent Graduate Student Uncovers Unseen Single Sentence Story by Beloved American Writer and Translator Lydia Davis." "How did I feel? I couldn't believe it! I opened a folder of business correspondence and there it was, staring at me. It's been a whirlwind since the discovery — and I was offered a position at the university!" 

I'm the soppy graduate student who concluded the years-long decision to pursue a PhD on the way up the long escalator at Angel tube station and was so relieved to reach some clarity that the combination of my realisation and the movement of the escalator up and towards something felt profound to me. Based on a track record of sentimentalism about projects' beginnings and endings, I can predict that once I'm done with the archive, I'll feel like I do now, brimful of love for Davis's writing and wistful in that I probably won't get to do much more about it. I'll box up the papers, leave the university library, and on the walk back to the hostel I'll pass:  

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Julie Tanner (@julietanner_) has recently completed a PhD in contemporary literature. Her writing is published in Textual Practice, C21, The Literary Encyclopedia, and Critical Insights: Flash Fiction. She might write a book but she also might not. 

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References