Missing
Siddhartha Deb explains something crucial about Lydia Davis’s fiction:
Sometimes, a title can be nearly as long as the story, as in “Mother’s Reaction to My Travel Plans,” whose entire text reads: “Gainsville! It’s too bad your cousin is dead!” We could almost text-message it, but then we wouldn’t get the effect of the surrounding white space, against which the words seem to suggest an almost gnomic quality. We might miss the exclamation marks, the italics, the iambic pentameter; we might miss the insight that we’re missing something.
P.S. May I add that the book’s beautiful cover does a fine job of offering an explanation too? Language is not transparent, like glass, but opaque, etc. etc.
