The House Behind

11/12/2025

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   Lydia Davis’s 'The House Behind' is as locationally precise as its meaning feels metaphorical, even allegorical. However, while it clearly distinguishes the house at the front, where people have more money and a better view, from the house at the back, Davis gives us nothing specific about the city they are in. Are these houses in New York, Chicago, Boston or, as just two details propose, somewhere in France? Most of the way, Davis’s work demands projection rather than comprehension as she seems to seek a vague specificity, one often pertinent to prose that escapes realism. It is partly why Lola Boorman quotes Mark McGurl, who “… seems to resolve this correlation between smallness and canonical eccentricity by including Davis in a list of 'miniaturists,' writers who are 'small and self-contained but not linguistically parsimonious . . . maximalism in a minimalist package.'” (Post 45) Yet American minimalism usually contained a high degree of realist specificity. In stories by Richard Ford, Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason and even Raymond Carver, place mattered as the writers opened up American literature to areas that may have appeared terra incognita to many readers. Mason, for example, might say “I’m a writer from the South and I write out of a Southern culture, but I’m not immersed in the South", yet many of her stories in Shiloh and Love Life are astute to the specifics of the region, mainly Tennessee and the surrounding states. Ford makes much of New Jersey in the Frank Bascombe books, like The Sportswriter and Independence Day.  

      This shows that, despite the apparent minimalism of such work, the writers extend into the world, giving us characters who, however limited, move around in it. In Davis’s fiction, her characters often move around in their own head. In 'Priority', the second-person narration wonders what to focus on. At the beginning, all we know is that somebody is sleeping, and the character muses over what should now take priority: watering the plants, writing a letter, tidying the kitchen or the living room as they go through all the possibilities and permutations in choosing one deed over another. In 'Story', the narrator does leave the house, but this movement is based on speculation, on wondering what her boyfriend has been up to after going to see a film with his ex-girlfriend. Action doesn’t kill thinking; it exacerbates it as she wonders if he has spent the whole evening with his ex-girlfriend or only some of it, with the suggestion there was no ex-girlfriend in the middle, when the narrator was phoning. She notes “the fact that he does not tell me the truth all the time makes me not sure of his truths at certain times, and then I work to figure out for myself if what he is telling me is the truth or not, and sometimes I can figure out it’s not the truth and sometimes I don’t know and never know, and sometimes just because he says it to me over and over again I am convinced it is the truth because I don’t believe he would repeat a life so often.”

        Frequently, Davis takes a possibility and shrinks it to its densest impossibility, leaving a character mired in mind and restless in spirit. The thought doesn’t reach its conclusion but collapses. It runs out of possible permutations and settles on anxious indecisiveness. Though her work can appear autobiographical, this wouldn’t be a useful way of looking at it. For a start, it would give the world, one that she strips down, a greater one than she wishes to show. It would be putting biographical flesh on the barest of bones and arriving at needless flab. What Davis often wants is to create exaggerated selves, versions of herself that will serve fictional ends over personal demands. As she says, “especially early on in my writing, I would sometimes write in the voice of a male narrator. Sometimes male, sometimes female, but usually female. Yet that female was not exactly myself – rather, an aspect or caricature of myself.” (The White Review). In another interview, she says, “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.” (Paris Review) She might say, “in general, it is true that I am always examining how I live my life. Always. It’s sort of relentless. Not just, Have I had a healthy breakfast? But everything.” (Paris Review)  

   Perhaps a better word to describe Davis’s work than autobiographical is self-absorbed, if we remove the judgment and see absorption as a way of dissolving the self into the specifics of a thought or the illumination of the concrete into the abstract. 'The House Behind' is a good example of the latter, with what may have been a casual perception — seeing in front flats or houses that are bigger, better decorated and with higher earners than one's own apartment block and turning it into an allegory of class. “The apartments inside the front house are lofty and comfortable, while ours are cramped and graceless. In the front house, maids live in the neat little rooms on the top floor and look out upon the spires of St-Etienne.” While we might assume this is France, in referencing St-Etienne, and later to Mme Bac rather than Mrs, the story never feels like a real place. It is more like one that has been hollowed out to allow for an investigation into how one feels as an inferior. As with many of Kafka’s tales, it is as if the events of the story are always secondary to an affect upon the narrator or central character. “Naturally, we can’t really blame the people in the front house for their wealth, but we are oppressed by it: we feel the difference. Yet this is not enough to explain the ill will that has always existed between the two houses.”  

     Even when an exterior event does take place, and a serious one, it possesses the air of a greater proof: it reveals how the narrator has been feeling. Yet it is one thing to find a neighbour doesn’t like you when you knock on their door, or hear people whispering behind your back, and another when someone gets murdered. It would usually take the narrator out of their feelings and throw them into an event. “The trash cans were always a source of embarrassment, but now the atmosphere has sharpened.” Sharpened seems too weak a word to describe someone killed, but not in a topsy-turvy world that regards a sense of inferiority as more significant than a murder. The murder is unfortunate rather than tragic or terrible, and this is because the person stabbed to death was one of the only ones from the front who would speak to people at the back. Sadly for the victim, the man who knifed her was from the house at the rear, and while he had no real reason to kill her, “for years he had wanted to live in the house in front, and it was becoming clear to him that he never would.” The narrator deems it a moment of class envy that exacerbates the gap between the two houses. She is left feeling more inferior still.

    Usually, when a murder occurs, in life or in fiction, the sociology of the deed isn't ignored. But it remains an aspect of the broader context, while the murder is what is centrally significant. When a newspaper reports on yet another knife killing on the streets of Britain, another shooting in Chicago, the report doesn’t headline with an unemployment rate and then drop into the article that someone was murdered the day before, nor, usually, would a work of fiction. We have murder mysteries for a reason: they aren’t called class divisions, even if many of them can be read through the desire to better oneself by bumping off someone else. The reverse emphasis gives The House Behind an aspect of the uncanny, a dream-like sense of inadequacy, one looking for a hyperbolised event to reflect it. “For a day or two, the people of both houses were visibly shaken. Talk was heard in the halls: in our house, voices rose like wind in the trees before a storm; in theirs, rich confident syllables rapped out like machine gun fire.” Yes, a murder has been committed, but the person is promptly carted off to jail, and life continues as (ab)normal. If Davis isn’t interested in dramatic events, she proves it by incorporating, in this instance, a murder that confirms an atmosphere rather than changes it. Though the narrator says “in any case, I suspect that after some years things will return to normal”, the story suggests that it was never thus.

    The murder confirms the narrator’s passivity: she says, “I saw it all from above. It happened very quickly and quietly. I did not do anything. For a while I did not even realise what I had seen: life is so uneventful back here that I have almost lost the ability to react.” Eventually, she aims to move away from the house, but this suggests little agency and not much enthusiasm, as if the lethargy of the environment will soon be too strong and her ability to leave will be impossible. “If I don’t leave now, I will soon be incapable of making the effort.”

   If much of Davis’s fiction occupies a place between abstraction and self-absorption, it is maybe best explained by her seeing a personal feeling meeting an impersonal realisation. A work can seem intimate without being confessional, partly because of the tension residing between solipsism and indifference. In 'The House Behind', one may sense that the narrator cares more about her feelings than she does about the murder committed, but what Davis extracts from this is an affect that is common, out of an event that is not. One of the problems with hyperbolised narratives (murders, grand family feuds, wars and tales of great ambition) is that they are exceptional stories which often allow only exceptional feelings: the reader doesn’t identify with the predicaments but becomes absorbed in the events. The works offer something closer to an ego ideal rather than an ego reality. One of the appeals of autofiction, of novels about little more than the mediocre events of one’s life (most famously explored in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s work) is that spending pages and pages over how to break down a door without feeling your masculinity is under threat if you fail to do so, can seem much closer to one’s reality than strategically trying to take out various opposing armies.

   Yet if Davis wants to capture the everyday, this needn’t be hers, as though in accepting that the everyday is everybody’s, then there is no need for it to be expressed personally. In 'Visit to Her Husband', a woman and her spouse are going through a divorce: “he goes in and urinates and leaves the toilet seat up and she goes in and lowers it and urinates… He drinks whisky and she drinks beer. When it is time for her to leave to catch her train he has drunk a lot and goes into the bathroom one last time to urinate and doesn’t bother to close the door.” There is no sense this is Davis’s divorce to writer Paul Auster (though it might be), since the details that would invoke such a claim (both writers, translators and New Yorkers) are absent, and why wouldn’t they be, since all Davis has to convey is the notion that divorce is now so common it needn’t be individuated. Equally, in 'Problem', she reduces the complicated lives of a handful of people to a few lines. “X is with Y, but living on money from Z. Y himself supports W, who lives with her child by V. V wants to move to Chicago but his child lives with W in New York”, and so on. The story is only ten lines long, but it conveys the chaotic era in which Davis was living. These could be her friends, or they might not be, as we have even less to go on than in 'Visit to Her Husband', 'Story' and 'The House Behind'. It is as if all these things are happening to other people, and one of them just happens to be oneself.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The House Behind

   Lydia Davis’s 'The House Behind' is as locationally precise as its meaning feels metaphorical, even allegorical. However, while it clearly distinguishes the house at the front, where people have more money and a better view, from the house at the back, Davis gives us nothing specific about the city they are in. Are these houses in New York, Chicago, Boston or, as just two details propose, somewhere in France? Most of the way, Davis’s work demands projection rather than comprehension as she seems to seek a vague specificity, one often pertinent to prose that escapes realism. It is partly why Lola Boorman quotes Mark McGurl, who “… seems to resolve this correlation between smallness and canonical eccentricity by including Davis in a list of 'miniaturists,' writers who are 'small and self-contained but not linguistically parsimonious . . . maximalism in a minimalist package.'” (Post 45) Yet American minimalism usually contained a high degree of realist specificity. In stories by Richard Ford, Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason and even Raymond Carver, place mattered as the writers opened up American literature to areas that may have appeared terra incognita to many readers. Mason, for example, might say “I’m a writer from the South and I write out of a Southern culture, but I’m not immersed in the South", yet many of her stories in Shiloh and Love Life are astute to the specifics of the region, mainly Tennessee and the surrounding states. Ford makes much of New Jersey in the Frank Bascombe books, like The Sportswriter and Independence Day.  

      This shows that, despite the apparent minimalism of such work, the writers extend into the world, giving us characters who, however limited, move around in it. In Davis’s fiction, her characters often move around in their own head. In 'Priority', the second-person narration wonders what to focus on. At the beginning, all we know is that somebody is sleeping, and the character muses over what should now take priority: watering the plants, writing a letter, tidying the kitchen or the living room as they go through all the possibilities and permutations in choosing one deed over another. In 'Story', the narrator does leave the house, but this movement is based on speculation, on wondering what her boyfriend has been up to after going to see a film with his ex-girlfriend. Action doesn’t kill thinking; it exacerbates it as she wonders if he has spent the whole evening with his ex-girlfriend or only some of it, with the suggestion there was no ex-girlfriend in the middle, when the narrator was phoning. She notes “the fact that he does not tell me the truth all the time makes me not sure of his truths at certain times, and then I work to figure out for myself if what he is telling me is the truth or not, and sometimes I can figure out it’s not the truth and sometimes I don’t know and never know, and sometimes just because he says it to me over and over again I am convinced it is the truth because I don’t believe he would repeat a life so often.”

        Frequently, Davis takes a possibility and shrinks it to its densest impossibility, leaving a character mired in mind and restless in spirit. The thought doesn’t reach its conclusion but collapses. It runs out of possible permutations and settles on anxious indecisiveness. Though her work can appear autobiographical, this wouldn’t be a useful way of looking at it. For a start, it would give the world, one that she strips down, a greater one than she wishes to show. It would be putting biographical flesh on the barest of bones and arriving at needless flab. What Davis often wants is to create exaggerated selves, versions of herself that will serve fictional ends over personal demands. As she says, “especially early on in my writing, I would sometimes write in the voice of a male narrator. Sometimes male, sometimes female, but usually female. Yet that female was not exactly myself – rather, an aspect or caricature of myself.” (The White Review). In another interview, she says, “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.” (Paris Review) She might say, “in general, it is true that I am always examining how I live my life. Always. It’s sort of relentless. Not just, Have I had a healthy breakfast? But everything.” (Paris Review)  

   Perhaps a better word to describe Davis’s work than autobiographical is self-absorbed, if we remove the judgment and see absorption as a way of dissolving the self into the specifics of a thought or the illumination of the concrete into the abstract. 'The House Behind' is a good example of the latter, with what may have been a casual perception — seeing in front flats or houses that are bigger, better decorated and with higher earners than one's own apartment block and turning it into an allegory of class. “The apartments inside the front house are lofty and comfortable, while ours are cramped and graceless. In the front house, maids live in the neat little rooms on the top floor and look out upon the spires of St-Etienne.” While we might assume this is France, in referencing St-Etienne, and later to Mme Bac rather than Mrs, the story never feels like a real place. It is more like one that has been hollowed out to allow for an investigation into how one feels as an inferior. As with many of Kafka’s tales, it is as if the events of the story are always secondary to an affect upon the narrator or central character. “Naturally, we can’t really blame the people in the front house for their wealth, but we are oppressed by it: we feel the difference. Yet this is not enough to explain the ill will that has always existed between the two houses.”  

     Even when an exterior event does take place, and a serious one, it possesses the air of a greater proof: it reveals how the narrator has been feeling. Yet it is one thing to find a neighbour doesn’t like you when you knock on their door, or hear people whispering behind your back, and another when someone gets murdered. It would usually take the narrator out of their feelings and throw them into an event. “The trash cans were always a source of embarrassment, but now the atmosphere has sharpened.” Sharpened seems too weak a word to describe someone killed, but not in a topsy-turvy world that regards a sense of inferiority as more significant than a murder. The murder is unfortunate rather than tragic or terrible, and this is because the person stabbed to death was one of the only ones from the front who would speak to people at the back. Sadly for the victim, the man who knifed her was from the house at the rear, and while he had no real reason to kill her, “for years he had wanted to live in the house in front, and it was becoming clear to him that he never would.” The narrator deems it a moment of class envy that exacerbates the gap between the two houses. She is left feeling more inferior still.

    Usually, when a murder occurs, in life or in fiction, the sociology of the deed isn't ignored. But it remains an aspect of the broader context, while the murder is what is centrally significant. When a newspaper reports on yet another knife killing on the streets of Britain, another shooting in Chicago, the report doesn’t headline with an unemployment rate and then drop into the article that someone was murdered the day before, nor, usually, would a work of fiction. We have murder mysteries for a reason: they aren’t called class divisions, even if many of them can be read through the desire to better oneself by bumping off someone else. The reverse emphasis gives The House Behind an aspect of the uncanny, a dream-like sense of inadequacy, one looking for a hyperbolised event to reflect it. “For a day or two, the people of both houses were visibly shaken. Talk was heard in the halls: in our house, voices rose like wind in the trees before a storm; in theirs, rich confident syllables rapped out like machine gun fire.” Yes, a murder has been committed, but the person is promptly carted off to jail, and life continues as (ab)normal. If Davis isn’t interested in dramatic events, she proves it by incorporating, in this instance, a murder that confirms an atmosphere rather than changes it. Though the narrator says “in any case, I suspect that after some years things will return to normal”, the story suggests that it was never thus.

    The murder confirms the narrator’s passivity: she says, “I saw it all from above. It happened very quickly and quietly. I did not do anything. For a while I did not even realise what I had seen: life is so uneventful back here that I have almost lost the ability to react.” Eventually, she aims to move away from the house, but this suggests little agency and not much enthusiasm, as if the lethargy of the environment will soon be too strong and her ability to leave will be impossible. “If I don’t leave now, I will soon be incapable of making the effort.”

   If much of Davis’s fiction occupies a place between abstraction and self-absorption, it is maybe best explained by her seeing a personal feeling meeting an impersonal realisation. A work can seem intimate without being confessional, partly because of the tension residing between solipsism and indifference. In 'The House Behind', one may sense that the narrator cares more about her feelings than she does about the murder committed, but what Davis extracts from this is an affect that is common, out of an event that is not. One of the problems with hyperbolised narratives (murders, grand family feuds, wars and tales of great ambition) is that they are exceptional stories which often allow only exceptional feelings: the reader doesn’t identify with the predicaments but becomes absorbed in the events. The works offer something closer to an ego ideal rather than an ego reality. One of the appeals of autofiction, of novels about little more than the mediocre events of one’s life (most famously explored in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s work) is that spending pages and pages over how to break down a door without feeling your masculinity is under threat if you fail to do so, can seem much closer to one’s reality than strategically trying to take out various opposing armies.

   Yet if Davis wants to capture the everyday, this needn’t be hers, as though in accepting that the everyday is everybody’s, then there is no need for it to be expressed personally. In 'Visit to Her Husband', a woman and her spouse are going through a divorce: “he goes in and urinates and leaves the toilet seat up and she goes in and lowers it and urinates… He drinks whisky and she drinks beer. When it is time for her to leave to catch her train he has drunk a lot and goes into the bathroom one last time to urinate and doesn’t bother to close the door.” There is no sense this is Davis’s divorce to writer Paul Auster (though it might be), since the details that would invoke such a claim (both writers, translators and New Yorkers) are absent, and why wouldn’t they be, since all Davis has to convey is the notion that divorce is now so common it needn’t be individuated. Equally, in 'Problem', she reduces the complicated lives of a handful of people to a few lines. “X is with Y, but living on money from Z. Y himself supports W, who lives with her child by V. V wants to move to Chicago but his child lives with W in New York”, and so on. The story is only ten lines long, but it conveys the chaotic era in which Davis was living. These could be her friends, or they might not be, as we have even less to go on than in 'Visit to Her Husband', 'Story' and 'The House Behind'. It is as if all these things are happening to other people, and one of them just happens to be oneself.


© Tony McKibbin