One of the books I got a kick out of last year was Jeremy M. Davies’ absurd and hilarious novel Fancy. Now, at Full Stop, Walker Rutter-Bowman has a great review of Davies’ collection of short fiction, The Knack of Doing. The collection, he says,
is a master class in writing by constraint. The constraints are playful, as if Davies has posed a series of small challenges for himself — write a story by letter, by repetition, by list, by blurb. Davies delights in the unlikelihood of stories. That he can draw drama from unlikely forms and sources animates his writing. He has the defiant air of an escape artist, finding elaborate ways to constrict himself, then freeing himself with a flourish. These escapes are displays of his talent: his virtuosic language, his grammatical panache, his narrative dexterity.
But the review is ultimately not a rapturous one, or at least not without reservations; Rutter-Bowman identifies some interesting ways in which Davies’ mastery of self-imposed constraints also leaves his stories a little stunted.
Infinite Patience 