Can’t and Won’t is made up of five numbered sections, each containing between twenty-three and twenty-six pieces, for a total of one hundred and twenty two pieces, many but not all of which are quite short. I really like the everydayness of these stories, and their crispness, and their humor, and how poignant some of them are, and how sharply observant many of them feel. Some of the stories are “dream” pieces (based on Davis’s own dreams, or dreams of friends), which are sometimes funny/weird/interesting and sometimes slightly flat; there are also several pieces translated from Flaubert’s letters and “slightly rewritten,” as Davis puts it in the notes at the end of the book. There are some longer pieces, including “The Cows,” which I loved when I read it as a standalone chapbook and still love, even without photos illustrating it, and “The Seals,” which is probably the most conventionally narrative piece, about a woman remembering her dead sister. (The narrator of “The Seals” is a passenger on a train, and some of my favorite bits of this story include descriptions of the view from the train windows, including this: “Trenton Makes, the World Takes—out the window. How many advertising slogans will I stare at out the window today? Now there are poles falling over into the water with all their wires still strung on them—what happened to them, and why were they left there?” (149).)
You can read the first five stories in the collection over at Book Keeping: I really like “The Dog Hair,” and “Circular Story” is pleasing, too. Other highlights of the book for me included “The Landing” (which you can read on the Telegraph’s website), “The Language of the Telephone Company” (which is one sentence, in two lines), “The Woman Next to Me on the Airplane” (which features crossword puzzles) and several list-like stories, including “How I Read as Quickly as Possible Through My Back Issues of the TLS,” “I’m Pretty Comfortable, But I Could Be a Little More Comfortable,” and “Local Obits.”
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