Samuel Johnson Is Indignant
Book | Lydia Davis
Davis is up to her old metafictional tricks again with fragment-length short stories and fastidious linguistic selections.
Fanciful wordplay? Check. Headily ironic philosophical observations? Check. Nail-bite-level suspense? Maybe not, but then again, Lydia Davis has never been one for the author's ball and chain, i.e. rising action, climax, falling action. In Samuel Johnson is Indignant, Davis is up to her old metafictional tricks again with fragment-length short stories and fastidious linguistic selections that often illustrate an entire psychic world in the crawl space of a verb and noun. Yes, a family takes a road trip in one story and two characters play a board game in another, but the real pleasure of reading these tales is not in finding out what happens to the shotgun hanging above the fireplace, but in discovering that semantic experimentation can reveal aspects of a character's inner landscape in ways traditional plot development cannot. You won't get warm, fuzzy, or amorous from these surgically trim pieces, but you will get bombarded with a-ha's!, hmmm's, and a bunch of other cognitive-leaning sounds.
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