The Visionary Company of Kathryn Davis by Alex Andriesse

I used to live in a bungalow in Shattuckville, Massachusetts. It was a ramshackle bungalow, built during the Great Depression and renovated, desultorily, by hippies—the floorboards were stoppered with wine corks; a torn flannel shirt plugged a hole in the wall—and Shattuckville was a ramshackle town. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a town at all but a hamlet on a hill, home to about thirty people. At the bottom of this hill lay the North River, some houses and trailers, and a fluctuating troupe of cats and dogs. The road to the river had once had a bridge at the end of it, until about a hundred years ago a flood came and washed the bridge away. It was never rebuilt. In winter, when the leaves were down, you could see a remnant of it sitting on the far bank, over where a country store out of operation since Reagan’s first term still advertised Ice-Cold Coca-Cola.

That bungalow was where I first read Kathryn Davis’s The Thin Place—a chorus of a novel about a small town in New England called Varennes. It features the voices of all kinds of creatures that live there: humans, yes, but also cats and dogs, beavers and moose, even lichen. You could call it ecofiction if you like the sound of that word, but I do not, so I will call it visionary, which is how I would describe pretty much everything that Kathryn Davis has written.

I don’t mean that Davis peers into the future (“a place, assuming it exists, I’ve never been all that keen on,” she says) but that she believes in the having of visions. You can see this in her first novel, Labrador (1988), when the narrator recalls going up to the third floor of her childhood house and seeing a tongue of fire that looked at her “with the same frank and unwavering interest I’d noticed in babies, as they rode the aisles of supermarkets in their mothers’ shopping carts.” And you can see it in The Thin Place, Davis’s sixth novel (2006), when Helen Zeebrugge climbs “a long steep staircase leading to an open door, behind which she hoped she would find her husband.” The thing is that Helen’s husband died years ago, and as she climbs, she starts to wonder what it is she’s going to see:

Something that couldn’t be contained in a body. Something large and seemingly inanimate, mineral even, like a rock or a hill, but also without any form at all, as if it were made of air, and just when you thought you were on the verge of seeing it for what it really was, it would suddenly dissolve into a pool of water and run down a hole in the floor the way an eel might or a snake, with bone-chilling, unknowable purpose.

To my mind, there’s nothing cockamamie about visions like these. They come out of a world of rocks, hills, snakes, and supermarkets—a world we all know. They are products of a vivid imagination, but an imagination formed by paying close attention to the day-to-day.

This might be one reason why Davis’s books make such an impression. They are jam-packed with the world, and the world is full of surprises and repetitions. Sometimes these repetitions are themselves surprising—leaping from writer to reader like a flea or a virus. Lynda Barry, reading Davis’s Duplex (2013), described the experience as downright “uncanny”:

At the exact moment the crickets are rubbing their legs together in the book, “chchch, chchchch, chhhh,” the crickets outside my window start up. I step outside to have a cigarette, light it, turn the page—and the sorcerer is lighting a cigarette for someone. In the next room a friend sings a line from Brigadoon, the exact lyric I’ve been reading in the book with no idea where it was from. At times it felt as if the book were moving things around me like a planchette on an Ouija board.

When I first read The Thin Place, something similar happened. Some of it can be chalked up to the landscape of northwestern Massachusetts, which isn’t so different from the landscape of central Vermont that Davis had in mind when creating Varennes. The same glaciers had shaped the North River valley; the same troublemaking dogs and black bears came to maul the suet feeder in my yard. There was a family of beavers half a mile up the road, and as I watched them navigate the dark rippling river, I could easily imagine them thinking, like the beavers in Varennes: “To swim at the surface! Your belly in water, air on your nose!”

But it wasn’t merely a matter of shared wildlife or geography. The more I read The Thin Place, the more my life seemed to take on its texture. When I drove into the nearest real town (pop. 1,787), I was now part of an ensemble cast like the one in the novel, all of us suddenly speaking lines of Davis-like, screwball-comedy dialogue. When I walked the hillside paths, I fell naturally into the novel’s free-floating sense of consciousness and cosmology and fun:

The universe a doughnut. A teacup. A scroll. Like a garment turned inside out.
The outside of a bag without anything in it. No throat. No tongue. No mind.
Also, no ventriloquist.
Let there be light, God said. But what was God that God could say that?
Where did His mouth come from? 

Davis had performed a magic trick that few writers manage. She had altered my mind. Not just the way I thought and felt but the way I saw and heard the life going on around me. Only the books of Penelope Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov have had a comparable effect, which is clearly an effect of style. Like Davis, Fitzgerald and Nabokov are writers who create (to borrow a phrase from Michael Chabon) “accurate scale models of [a] beautiful and broken world.” They are stylists whose styles are the result of close looking and listening, followed by a long period of arrangement and rearrangement (more looking and listening, albeit behind closed doors), until there is pattern and order and still just a smidge of chaos, since without chaos there would be no trick to perform, no scale model to assemble, because: no world.

***

A few years after I first read The Thin Place, I found myself interviewing Davis for an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, which I was editing at the time. We talked then, as we still talk now, about writing and animals and the city of Philadelphia, where part of my family is from, and where Davis was born on November 13, 1946. Her childhood in a semidetached house on Woodale Road, at the edge of the affluent suburb of Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, has found its way into many of her books. It’s there most directly in the haunted house in Hell (1998), the suburban street in Duplex, and the shared childhood memories of the mysterious “we” who narrate The Silk Road (2019). But once you have entered the labyrinth of Davis’s work, you begin to see it, or sense it, around every corner: an atmosphere of dread ruled by the rituals of parents and the patterns of convention—a place where the important things go unsaid or are spoken in code so that if the children overhear, they won’t understand. A place that anybody in their right mind would try to escape.

As a child, Davis escaped into fairy tales (especially those of Hans Christian Andersen), Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and the fiction of Virginia Woolf. Later, she went away to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied alongside her girlhood friend Peggy Reavey and Reavey’s future husband David Lynch. (“Sometimes I find it hard to believe that David Lynch used to sit at my parents’ dinner table eating fish sticks,” she once told me in passing.) At twenty-three she landed in central Vermont, at Goddard College, where she took part in writing workshops, started to teach, and eventually found a friend and something like a soulmate in the poet Louise Glück.

You can clearly see that Davis comes out of the same postwar American ferment as Lynch and Reavey when you read Hell, her novel about a house in suburban Philadelphia that has become unstuck in time. In some chapters this house exists in the fifties, with Edwin and Dorothy drinking and bickering while their two daughters play with an antique dollhouse upstairs and Noodle, the family dachshund, noses about. In other chapters it exists in the eighties, after the widowed Edwin has had a debilitating stroke, his daughters have moved out, and Noodle has been succeeded by Noodle III. These chapters are periodically interrupted and eventually superseded by the voice of Edwina Moss, who lived in the area a century earlier and won’t stop soliloquizing from beyond the grave about the perils of housekeeping and her obsession with the famous chef Antonin Carême.

“Something is wrong in the house,” Davis’s narrator keeps telling us, and it doesn’t take us long to believe her. Hell is a novel preoccupied by the lightness and darkness peculiar to middle-class America in the fifties and early sixties, but like Lynch’s in Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks, Davis’s approach to these shady lanes is not sociological so much as it is cosmic. A girl in the neighborhood has been abducted; all the fathers deposit their used razor blades into slots that lead to a space between the walls; it’s the nineteen fifties and the nineteen eighties and the nineteenth century all at once. A house may be a vessel for time, but mortals can’t move through time the way we move through a house. We move perpetually in the quicksand of the present. But what, Hell asks, is the present?

Hell, her third book, marked a turning point for Davis. Not that her first two had been conventional. Her debut, Labrador, is about two sisters growing up and breaking free from the “dark principality” of their parents’ marriage. This may sound like standard fare until you consider that one of the sisters is being visited by an angel named Rogni and travels to the icy wilds of Labrador, where her grandfather is killed by a polar bear. Five years later, in 1993, came The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, which tells the story of the invented Danish opera composer Helle Ten Brix from the perspective of Frances Thorn, a single mother of twins who has run away from her wealthy Philadelphia family to become a waitress in upstate New York, where, in the nineteen sixties, the elderly Helle comes to live with her niece. It is an opera in novel form.

These are both tentacular books, collecting and contorting at every turn. Their narrative relentlessness (of the kind you find in Nabokov or Jean Stafford) produces breathtaking effects, as when Frances describes a power outage in a small-town supermarket down to its smallest details (her senses perhaps heightened by the darkness and the fact that she’s about to take the outage as an opportunity to shoplift a cake for her daughters’ birthday party):

The music stopped and the cash registers wouldn’t work; the only thing you could hear was the squeaking wheels of the shopping carts and, if you were near the fish counter, the faint tapping of lobster claws on glass. Shoppers peered deeply into bins of peaches looking for that blush which signifies ripeness; they squinted, trying to make out expiration dates on yogurt containers.

In Hell, Davis turns her hand to shorter paragraphs and shorter chapters, letting readers fill in the gaps. She never stops being interested in the traditional aspects of the novel (story, setting, character, the passage of time), but the form now becomes less self-consciously novelistic. Often she makes a sort of collage, mashing up styles and genres, as in The Walking Tour (1999), a murder mystery narrated from postapocalyptic Maine after reality has been undermined by the internet, or Versailles (2002), which alternates chapters from the perspective of Marie Antoinette with surreal, eighteenth-century-style playlets (with titles like Mesdames and The King’s Penis) as well as chapters from the perspective of an early twenty-first-century woman who sounds an awful lot like Kathryn Davis.

There is, in all of this, a child’s serious sense of play. These are novels that require participation, like games. When you finish The Thin Place, in which the omniscient narrator swoops from character to character and all through Varennes, you almost expect to be able to take the thing apart like a puzzle and put it back in its box, to be reassembled another day.

The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, like a game of chess, proceeds toward a conclusion, with an end in mind. The later novels engage in more and more open-ended play, making it possible to encounter, by the time we get to The Silk Road, a “cove of sparkling light” that may be “a real pool of something like water” or “just a gathering of attention, all of it in one place, as solid and bright-surfaced as a jewel but otherwise beside the point.” The game creates itself as it goes along—a process that brings to mind what Louise Glück says, in one of her lectures on writing: “The longer I withheld conclusion, the more I saw.”

Davis and Glück were not only good friends; they were each other’s most trusted readers. (Glück dedicated The Wild Iris, Vita Nova, Winter Recipes from the Collective, and Marigold and Rose to Davis, and Davis has so far dedicated The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, The Walking Tour, and Aurelia, Aurélia to Glück.) If you go back and forth between their books, you can almost pretend you’re eavesdropping. You quickly pick up that they’re both sisters of sisters, both haunted by “repressed fifties households,” both lovers of opera and flowers, murder mysteries and the classics.

The conversation between them went on for decades, until Glück’s death in 2023. One scratches only the surface by pointing out that The Thin Place, a novel about village life, makes room for the consciousness of lichen, while Glück’s A Village Life gives voice to an earthworm (“It is not sad not to be human …”), or that Glück’s Faithful and Virtuous Night is narrated by an undefined “we,” which morphs into an “I” by turns male and female, while The Silk Road is narrated by a “we” that sometimes speaks as individual men and women and sometimes as a collective whose overlapping memories suggest that they’re siblings, or the same person, or perhaps cohabitants of the same bardo, though whether this is the life bardo or the dying bardo or some other bardo entirely seems impossible to say.

***

I don’t think I knew that there were so many bardos until I read Davis’s memoir, Aurelia, Aurélia (2022). “We’re born into the life bardo,” she explains,

and when we begin to die we’re in the dying bardo, and after that we’re in the death bardo, at which point we make our transition back via rebirth into the birth bardo, having experienced delight in the meeting between sperm and ovum and from that state of bliss fainting into unconsciousness and, as time passes, coming to maturity in the womb until, finally, emerging from the womb and opening our eyes, we will have turned into a puppy or something and are back once again in the life bardo.

The memoir grew by accident out of Davis’s attempt to write a nonfiction book about “the art of transition.” As this passage makes clear, Aurelia, Aurélia still plays variations on that theme. Davis’s memories of her own life are juxtaposed with ghost stories, dreams, reflections on Ludwig van Beethoven, Gérard de Nerval, and—naturally, given all the talk of bardos—The Tibetan Book of the Dead. She writes about her short first marriage to a German location scout (and their miserable sojourn on a Greek island, where he pretended to be dying) and about her much longer marriage to the writer and environmental economist Eric Zencey, whose death from cancer in 2019 is the epicenter of Aurelia, Aurélia. Out of these memories and visions, she creates a scale model of her own life.

But not just her own. (There’s even room in the scale model for me, her friend Alex, who has just moved into a brick row house in The Hague.) The self, for Davis, is a point of departure, and in this way, too, Aurelia, Auréliais of a piece with her fiction of the past thirty years, in which she often takes on the role of narrator, personally convening the townspeople and the beavers, or the French aristocrats headed for the guillotine, or the cloud of souls all raised in Philadelphia. Whether it’s small-town New England or the palace of Versailles, place, for Davis, is the essential thing. Her philosophy seems to be that, if she can find somewhere with a view, she will begin to see.

The place doesn’t need to exist in the physical realm. In a piece from 2019 called “Walking in the Dark,” she describes herself peering from bardo to bardo, squinting “across the parkway” into a house where the children’s book writer Margaret Wise Brown, the novelist and memoirist Calvin Kentfield, and the singer-songwriter Connie Converse are all “sleeping together in one double bed.” All three of them have been dead for decades, so there’s nothing like “sexual intercourse” going on (“for one thing, that’s not what it’s called on the other side of the parkway”). They’re just keeping each other company somewhere in Davis’s imagination, and by imagining this company, she joins it:

We go walking in the dark, Connie was singing, sitting on her kitchen chair in the corner of the living room on the other side of the parkway, playing her guitar. We go walking out at night. And it’s not as lovers go, two by two, to and fro; but it’s one by one—one by one in the dark. We go walking out at night. As we wander through the grass we can hear each other pass, but we’re far apart.

Davis is a nimble writer. She proceeds with a “lightness of thoughtfulness” (that’s Italo Calvino) and an eye for the almost infinite connections between us. But she isn’t one to ignore the dark or the finite, the ways we don’t connect and the ways we, in every sense, miss each other. Of course, that would go with the territory of visions. Or as Davis puts it at the end of The Thin Place: “It was the first morning of the world. It was the first morning of the world, and later it was finished.”

 

Alex Andriesse is an associate editor at New York Review Books. His writing has appeared in Granta, Southwest Review, and The Millions. He is the editor of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Uncollected Essays and the translator of François-René de Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, Cristina Campo’s The Unforgivable, and, most recently, Jacques Dupin’s Notched.