Less Time in Can’t and Won’t

Lydia Davis’s “flash fictions” shift our attention from narrative to verbal craft, evident in her resolute choice of words, syntax, and sentence rhythms. An abbreviated style compels readers to focus on fully stopped moments, an effect that defies narrative progression much as do Joy Williams’s and Alice Munro’s discontinuous stories. Like them as well, the development of a later style is a matter of branching into new directions—in her case, continuing a microscopic fascination with individual words and their resonances, but now shifting toward found objects (Flaubert’s letters), or letters of complaint, or grammatical puzzles: all as “witness” narratives revealing the ways in which the mundane minutiae of life is transformed into art. The borders between fiction and nonfiction become less clear, as Davis presses on the boundaries of what a short story can be.