The Sock

by Lydia Davis

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

Unknown Binding

About the author

Lydia Davis, acclaimed fiction writer and translator, is famous in literary circles for her extremely brief and brilliantly inventive short stories. In fall 2003 she received one of 25 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” awards. In granting the award the MacArthur Foundation praised Davis’s work for showing “how language itself can entertain, how all that what one word says, and leaves unsaid, can hold a reader’s interest. . . . Davis grants readers a glimpse of life’s previously invisible details, revealing new sources of philosophical insights and beauty.” In 2013 She was the winner of the Man Booker International prize.

Davis’s recent collection, “Varieties of Disturbance” (May 2007), was featured on the front cover of the “Los Angeles Times Book Review” and garnered a starred review from “Publishers Weekly.” Her “Samuel Johnson Is Indignant” (2001) was praised by “Elle” magazine for its “Highly intelligent, wildly entertaining stories, bound by visionary, philosophical, comic prose—part Gertrude Stein, part Simone Weil, and pure Lydia Davis.”

Davis is also a celebrated translator of French literature into English. The French government named her a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for her fiction and her distinguished translations of works by Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Jean Jouve, Michel Butor and others.

Davis recently published a new translation (the first in more than 80 years) of Marcel Proust’s masterpiece, “Swann’s Way” (2003), the first volume of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” A story of childhood and sexual jealousy set in fin de siecle France, “Swann’s Way” is widely regarded as one of the most important literary works of the 20th century.

The “Sunday Telegraph” (London) called the new translation “A triumph [that] will bring this inexhaustible artwork to new audiences throughout the English-speaking world.” Writing for the “Irish Times,” Frank Wynne said, “What soars in this new version is the simplicity of language and fidelity to the cambers of Proust’s prose… Davis’ translation is magnificent, precise.”

Davis’s previous works include “Almost No Memory” (stories, 1997), “The End of the Story” (novel, 1995), “Break It Down” (stories, 1986), “Story and Other Stories” (1983), and “The Thirteenth Woman” (stories, 1976).

Grace Paley wrote of “Almost No Memory” that Lydia Davis is the kind of writer who “makes you say, ‘Oh, at last!’—brains, language, energy, a playfulness with form, and what appears to be a generous nature.” The collection was chosen as one of the “25 Favorite Books of 1997” by the “Voice Literary Supplement” and one of the “100 Best Books of 1997” by the “Los Angeles Times.”

Davis first received serious critical attention for her collection of stories, “Break It Down,” which was selected as a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. The book’s positive critical reception helped Davis win a prestigious Whiting Writer’s Award in 1988.

She is the daughter of Robert Gorham Davis and Hope Hale Davis. From 1974 to 1978 Davis was married to Paul Auster, with whom she has a son, Daniel Auster. Davis is currently married to painter Alan Cote, with whom she has a son, Theo Cote. She is a professor of creative writing at University at Albany, SUNY.
Davis is considered hugely influential by a generation of writers including Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, who once wrote that she "blows the roof off of so many of our assumptions about what constitutes short fiction."

Reviews

[Jack Rousseau · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Story:

My husband is married to a different woman now, shorter than I am, about five feet tall, solidly built, and of course he looks taller than he used to and narrower, and his head looks smaller. Next to her I feel bony and awkward and she is too short for me to look her in the eye, though I try to stand or sit at the right angle to do that. I once had a clear idea of the sort of woman he should marry when he married again, but none of his girlfriends was quite what I had in mind and this one least of all.
They came out here last summer for a few weeks to see my son, who is his and mine. There were some touchy moments, but there were also some good times, though of course even the good rimes were a little uneasy. The two of them seemed to expect a lot of accommodation from me, maybe because she was sick - she was in pain and sulky, with circles under her eyes. They would walk up slowly from the beach to my house and shower there, and later walk away clean in the evening, with my son between them, hand in hand. I gave a party and they came and danced with each other, impressed my friends, and stayed till the end. I went out of my way for them, mostly because of our boy. I thought we should all get along for his sake. By the end of their visit I was tired.
The night before they went, we had a plan to eat out in a Vietnamese restaurant with his mother. His mother was flying in from another city, and then the three of them were going off together the next day, to the Midwest. His wife's parents were giving them a big wedding party so that all the people she had grown up with, the stout farmers and their families, could meet him.
When I went into the city that night to where they were staying, I took what they had left in my house that I had found so far: a book, next to the closet door, and somewhere else a sock of his. I drove up to the building and I saw my husband out on the sidewalk flagging me down. He wanted to talk to me before I went inside. He told me his mother was in bad shape and couldn't stay with them, and he asked me if I could please take her home with me later. Without thinking I said I would. I was forgetting the way she would look at the inside of my house and how I would clean the worst of it while she watched.
In the lobby, they were sitting across from each other in two armchairs, these two small women, both beautiful in different ways, both wearing heavy lipstick, different shades, both frail, I thought later, in different ways. The reason they were sitting here was that his mother was afraid to go upstairs. It didn't bother her to fly in an airplane, but she couldn't go up more than one story in an apartment building. It was worse now than it had been. In the old days she could be on the eighth floor if she had to, as long as the windows were tightly shut.
Before we went out to dinner my husband took the book up to the apartment, but he had stuck the sock in his back pocket without thinking when I gave it to him out on the street and it stayed there during the meal in the restaurant, where his mother sat in her black clothes at the end of the table opposite an empty chair, sometimes playing with my son, with his cars, and sometimes asking my husband and then me and then his wife questions about the peppercorns and other strong spices that might be in her food. Then after we all left the restaurant and were standing in the parking lot, he pulled the sock out of his pocket and looked at it, wondering how it had got there.
It was a small thing, but later I couldn't forget the sock, because there was this one sock in his back pocket in a strange neighborhood way out in the eastern part of the city in a Vietnamese ghetto, by the massage parlors, and none of us really knew this city but we were all here together and it was odd, because I still felt as though he and I were partners; we had been partners a long time, and I couldn’t help thinking of all the other socks of his I had picked up, stiff with his sweat and threadbare on the sole, in all our life together from place to place, and then of his feet in those socks, how the skin shone through at the ball of the foot and the heel where the weave was worn down; how he would lie reading on his back on the bed with his feet crossed at the ankles so that his toes pointed at different corners of the room; how he would then turn on his side with his feet together like two halves of a fruit; how, still reading, he would reach down and pull off his socks and drop them in little balls on the floor and reach down again and pick at his toes while he read; sometimes he shared with me what he was reading and thinking, and sometimes he didn’t know whether I was there in the room or somewhere else.
I couldn't forget it later, even though after they were gone I found a few other things they had left, or rather his wife had left them in the pocket of a jacket of mine - a red comb, a red lipstick, and a bottle of pills. For a while these things sat around in a little group of three on one counter of the kitchen and then another, while I thought I'd send them to her, because I thought maybe the medicine was important, but I kept forgetting to ask, until finally I put them away in a drawer to give her when they came out again, because by then it wasn't going to be long, and it made me tired all over again just to think of it.

My Response:

It would be easy to dismiss the story as a work of "autobiographical fiction". The husband is undoubtedly based on Paul Auster, to whom Davis was married, and with whom Davis had a son. But the story develops far beyond the autobiographical details that may or may not have contributed to its composition, as Davis attests...

"Just because a story uses material from the writer’s life, I don’t think you can say that it’s her life, or that the narrator is her. As soon as you select the material from your life, and arrange it and write it in a stylized manner, it’s no longer really identical to that life and that person. But often something will start from my real life. So there I am with the dictionary. And here is a conundrum, a puzzle, and often one question will lead to other questions that seem logical to me. What do I treat the best and why? But again, it’s stylized. I’m leaving out a great deal. It’s not a complete picture"
(Paris Review Interview)

Likewise, it would be easy to dismiss the story as passé or trivial. Readers of mainstream fiction generally don't like to be challenged by what they're reading. But this is one of Davis's least challenging stories: its subtext is evident without being overt, and its very short (even for a short story). It is common to the point of exasperation to dismiss a short story for its length. A short story (like the best of Davis) is not pointless but concise. The failure to recognize the "point of the story" is the reader's failure, not the writers. (This is not always the case. But I will defend any of Davis's stories to the death.)
The suggestion that this is one of Davis's least challenging stories is evident to any of her readers. For anyone who hasn't read Davis, it is pertinent to compare her writing to someone like Samuel Beckett, as much for their concise style as for their experimentation. (Like Davis, Beckett's writing has been criticized for being seemingly "pointless" and "obscure".) The comparison to Beckett is not original. Davis herself acknowledges her debt to Beckett...

"I came to Beckett very early on and was startled by his pared-down style. As I practiced writing (in my early twenties), I actively studied his way of putting sentences together. I copied out favorite sentences of his. What I liked was the plain, Anglo-Saxon vocabulary; the intelligence; the challenge to my intelligence; the humor that undercut what might have been a heavy message; and the self-consciousness about language"
(Believer Interview)

Here's another excerpt from that same interview. I'm not making a point with this second excerpt, I'm just endlessly impressed by Davis...

"I am simply not interested, at this point, in creating narrative scenes between characters. Maybe I’m shying away from a certain artificiality that I perceive to be present in many such scenes as written. Although, as soon as I say that, I think of other possible reactions to that perception of artificiality: how a writer like Jane Bowles, for instance, lets a certain acknowledged artificiality be an effective part of those narrative scenes between characters.(...) We all have an ongoing narrative inside our heads, the narrative that is spoken aloud if a friend asks a question. That narrative feels deeply natural to me. We also hang on to scraps of dialogue. Our memories don’t usually serve us up whole scenes complete with dialogue. So I suppose I’m saying that I like to work from what a character is likely to remember, from a more interior place."
(Believer Interview)

[Allegra S · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this story a lot! Even though we let go of grudges and harmful feelings and move on, we can't erase our history. Once in awhile a seemingly benign object or situation will bring all of those feelings up to the front of our minds and we'll have reactions and emotions based on all of those past experiences. Being able to recognize that is occurring is powerful, but it doesn't stop you from feeling the emotions. In this story the woman is trying to let go, move on, and accept her former partner's new partner, but thinking of the sock brings up past and possibly unresolved feelings.

I think this is one of the reasons human beings have issues with intimacy, vulnerability, and putting ourselves out there. Because once you've been hurt you will always carry that scar and when you are reminded of things you'd rather not remember and it will make you "tired all over again just to think of it".

[Asmaa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the simplicity of the words yet their effectiveness. I liked how the author described the little details about how someone can take you for granted. I liked also how she managed to relate the sock to everyday life details that all women could relate to. I felt the narrator's subtle jealousy, love and helplessness through every word.

[Nhu]

I don't really know what to make of it.

[Madeleine · Rating 2 out of 5]

About as likable as a sock.

[Danyel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I may have to come back later and update this review. I liked this short story. I have never read a short story that was autobiographical in nature so this was very interesting. It is a glimpse into what happens after a marriage breaks downs and the parties move on. There was no real plot however, just the musings of the author.

[Emi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ok but who picks at their toes when they read

[Lafcadio · Rating 2 out of 5]

A bit rambley and hard to discern the point.

[Anila · Rating 3 out of 5]

A peek into the thoughts of woman as she endures a visit from her ex-husband and his wife

[Hayden Casey · Rating 2 out of 5]

and the point of this story was . . ?