The Barber of Language

ESSAYS ONE

BY LYDIA DAVIS

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 508 pp., $30

“I LIKED TEACHING because I liked telling other people what to do,” remarks the narrator of Lydia Davis’s story “The Professor.” In the next sentence, she says apologetically, “In those days it seemed clearer to me than it does now that if I did something a certain way, it had to be right for other people, too.” But as Davis’s collection of essays reveals, this teacherly writer still likes telling other people what to do.

Davis is a kind of barber of language, a technician who cuts, which features exercises of this sort, like this: I’m not sure I have the trick, though she does tell us in some of the most important pieces in her new book, grouped in a recurring section called “The Practice of Writing,” quite specifically how she herself trims and shapes, cuts and shaves, and thus, by implication, how we—if we’re aspiring writers—should follow the same procedures.