The End of the Story - Hardcover

Davis, Lydia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374148317 ISBN 13: 9780374148317

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1995

Synopsis

Moving across the country to take a job, a writer in her thirties finds herself absorbed in a complex relationship with a much younger man and struggles with its eventual breakdown and a long subsequent period of recovery.

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Reviews

Davis (Break It Down, a story collection) plunges into fiction-as-catharsis in her absorbing and lucid first novel. The narrative is comprised of the unnamed narrator's memories of and reflections upon her ended love affair with a nameless man 13 years her junior; its history infiltrates the books she reads and translates, as well as the novel she is struggling to write, which is this novel. As she probes the moments and minutiae of their relationship, the man's identity fades, and he becomes material for her fiction: like a backward-spiraling track into memory, a labyrinthine sentence mimes the diminishing roar of his car when he leaves her. Scenes gather, dissolve and reassemble, as does the man's fragmented image, with impressions and facts seeping through the narrator's consciousness and dreams-the man's skin, hair, clothing, his charm and flaws, his lies and his library, the money he fails to repay. Avoiding the earthiness of dialogue, of which there is none, the narrator experiences much of the world as "floating" ("his essence floated inside me")-the man's anger, her own features in a mirror, another story wafting loose in a room where a book lies open. Bereft, she turns stalker and voyeur, searching for her lover (as for story material) through streets surreal and noir, peering into his room and the gas station where he works. Finally, a cup of bitter tea, offered in a bookstore, provides ritual closure to the story of her search for her lover, though "something continued, something not formed into any story." Despite Davis's writerly self-consciousness, her novel works as an aching love story recollected in tranquillity. Translation, first serial, dramatic rights: Georges Borchardt.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The narrator of this novel, who never reveals her name, is writing a novel about an obsessive relationship she had with a younger man. Although the woman did not seem totally committed while the couple was together, she became completely obsessed with her former partner after they separated. This first-person remembrance, with events imprecisely defined and sometimes out of sequence, is self-conscious and introspective. The narration is highly descriptive, and there is no dialog. The narrator comments that "my thoughts are not orderly-one is interrupted by another, or one contradicts another, and in addition to that, my memories are quite often false, confused, abbreviated, or collapsed into one another." A more apt description of the style would be hard to imagine. For anyone who has had a failed intimate relationship, this book could be uncomfortable reading. From the author of Break It Down (Farrar, 1986), a short story collection.
Kimberly G. Allen, MCI Corporate Information Resources Ctr., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Admirers of Break It Down, a magnetic collection of stories, will not be disappointed by Davis' novel. While attempting to piece together the details of her affair with a much younger man, a college professor writes in retrospect; her words are imbued with an arresting self-consciousness. Even though the tale's conclusion has been disclosed from the outset, an odd force propels the narrative forward. Simultaneously with relating her affair, the narrator ponders the path the novel at hand is taking and the process of writing itself. Constructed in brutally perceptive and dazzlingly revelatory prose, this is a stunning work. Alice Joyce

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374148317
• ISBN 13: 9780374148317
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 231