The End of the Story

She describes her narrator's thought process in the same manner: by relentlessly layering verifiable data that fragmentarily alludes to the whole, but doesn't venture to name it or box it in. It's similar to the mundane minimalism of Japanese writers such as Murakami, and Davis's description of a one such Japanese writer could also be applied to her book: "His novels are meticulously constructed, have very little plot, and present information in a fragmentary, offhand way."

As such, The End of the Story is a slow-starting novel. The details accrue so minutely that it takes quite a while before they amass enough surface area for the reader to pierce, or even intuit, the novel's interior world (I didn't really begin to enjoy it until around the hundredth page). But the same coldness that makes the prose difficult to pierce lends extra poignancy to moments of unguarded emotion and deadpan humor, as in this passage:

"Then I think we should keep a pig here to eat our table scraps, and that the Senior Citizens Center should keep a pig, too, because so much food is thrown out when the old people don't eat it, as I used to see when I went to pick up Vincent's father at lunchtime. The pig could be fattened on these scraps until the holiday season, and then provide the senior citizens with a holiday meal. A new baby pig could be bought in the spring and amuse the senior citizens with its antics."

The novel is more about the narrator's inability to accurately reconstruct the events of the affair than it is about the affair itself, as her memories contradict or influence one another. I can only describe the literary style as "precision vagueness." Every half- or mis-remembered incident is exhaustively cataloged to the limit of its possible motivations, repercussions, time and place, couched in clusters of "ors." It was either this way or that way or another way I've forgotten, is the quickly emergent pattern, and everything, even the dialogue, is imparted in the monolithic voice of the narrator, so we're constantly reminded that the events are taking place in the churning quagmire of her memory, and not in the concrete world of magisterial fictive authority. The text constantly wrestles with its inability to be accurate, by dint of failing memory or willful misrepresentation:

"I see that I'm shifting the truth around a little, at certain points accidentally, but at others deliberately. I am rearranging what actually happened so that it is not only less confusing and more believable, but also more acceptable or palatable."

"Now, if I finish it," Davis's narrator writes of her novel, "I don't know if I will be satisfied. I know I will be relieved, but I don't know if I will be relieved that I have told the story or simply that the work is over." Control freaks and story lovers everywhere will recognize the need for control and clarity that inform this novel, and the frustrating impossibility of arranging the details of our lives into orderly narrative structures. In the end, the process itself, even if it fails, is a sort of catharsis, and one hopes that Davis, as well as all poor souls who've experienced a loss to which they've failed to append redemptive meaning (i.e. nearly everyone), find some succor in this novel's graceful, fastidious and utterly unflinching eye.