31 Days of Short Stories: Day 7. “We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth-Graders,” by Lydia Davis

Posted 7 August, 2008 in Short Stories, 31 Days of Short Stories |

From Varieties of Disturbance: Stories

The title of Lydia Davis’s collection of stories, Varieties of Disturbance, is appropriate, since Davis takes great pleasure in subverting traditional notions of what stories are and what they are capable of doing. Not for her the straightforward naturalistic tale in the Chekhovian mode; she prefers to craft genre-bending micro-narratives and tales that do not subscribe to standard notions of plot, character, or setting. This 218-page volume contains fifty-seven stories, many of them running only one or two lines. The entire text of the story “Index Entry,” for example, reads, “Christian, I’m not a.”

Much has been made of Davis’s minimalism, of her habit of eliding necessary information and providing instead encounters that resemble pure language — language that has been pulled taut such that it often seems to be straining at its edges. Her sentences are pared down and declarative, and the plentiful white space on many of her pages alludes in an almost mocking way to the information that is deliberately withheld from the reader.

“We Miss You” is, in certain ways, different. It is a longer story, to begin with, running to a relatively portly twenty-four pages. Superficially, it resembles Borges’s story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” in that it is written as an academic study of an existing text, but Davis inserts a comic debasement into this conceit by making the text under consideration a collection of twenty-seven get-well letters written by a group of fourth-graders in the 1950s to a hospitalized classmate.

The story is written in clinical, precise detail, taking up such subjects as the physical layout of the school, the general appearance and form of the letters, their penmanship, their salutations and closings:

The closings vary within a narrow range: “Your friend” (5 boys and 10 girls); “Your classmate” (3 girls and 2 boys); “Love” (1 boy); and “Your pal of pals” (1 boy: this was Jonathan, a close friend). It should be noted that only the boys use the colloquial “pal,” whereas nearly twice as many girls as boys use the more formal “friend.”

We learn the names of a number of the pupils, but Davis provides nothing resembling character development; the only information we have about the students is what the writer of the study is able to deduce from the letters themselves. It is suggested, for example, that Scott is possessed by strong feelings as a result of his note, which includes the phrase “I’d yank you out of bed.” Cynthia, by contrast, is described as a realist for her description of building snowmen over the Christmas holiday: “I have made snowmen but they have fallen down.” The writer goes on to analyze such characteristics of the letters as their use of complex or compound sentences, verb tenses, imperatives, and style.

All of this is humorous and subversive, in the manner of Borges, but, like a sleight-of-hand magician, it also diverts the reader’s attention away from the main thrust of Davis’s story. While it is true that we learn very little about the students who write the letters, there is one character in the story we learn a great deal about: the author of the study itself. By following the increasingly detailed deconstructions of the letters that the author provides, it gradually becomes apparent that the person writing the report is, in effect, utterly deluded. By layering critical notions more appropriate to high-level academic writing onto the mandated work of a class of grade-four students, the author reveals him or herself to be naive at best and, at worst, utterly insane.

So, for example, the writer notes that one of the students misspells her own name, then offers the following explanation:

Another case is that of Arlene: although she is eminently practical, and seems sincere in her choice of nursing as a profession, she may betray a degree of suppressed romanticism (and thus an attraction toward a less practical vocation) in her highly unusual alteration of her own name from the more down-to-earth “Arlene” to the prettier and more fanciful “Arilene.”

The idea that the fourth-grader betrays “a degree of suppressed romanticism” through her misspelling, which the study’s author imputes to be entirely volitional on the girl’s part — “her highly unusual alteration” — is patently absurd, the product of a mind that does not have the first inkling as to the psychology of a fourth-grade girl. As readers we can laugh at this but, as with much satire, we are also liable to forget that what Davis is dramatizing is not all that far removed from reality: many of the theories currently espoused by educators and child psychologists would not feel out of place alongside this anonymous writer’s study.

Like all good comic writing, then, there is a serious point at the core of Davis’s story. What begins as a comic formal conceit ends up being something much more: a carefully calibrated satirical volley that operates beneath the surface of the reader’s immediate awareness, employing its own subversiveness to score a direct hit on its target.

1 comment to “31 Days of Short Stories: Day 7. “We Miss You: A Study of Get-Well Letters from a Class of Fourth-Graders,” by Lydia Davis”

Lit Blog, October 8th, 2008 at 3:17 am:

• #59 - Varieties of Disturbance, by Lydia Davis…

  I hate to say it (you have no idea how much, I assure you), but I was not particularly impressed by this book. “We Miss You,” the remarkable piece Mr. Beattie wrote about in August was one of the……

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