The House Behind by Lydia Davis, 1997
The magic trick:
Setting up a haves-have nots dichotomy in the story, and then putting beautiful writing in the voice of a have-nots narrator
Davis here maps out the social gulf between two neighboring residential buildings in Paris. She does so beautifully. The writing at times is just exquisite. Consider this description of a murder: “His gesture was a classically beautifully one; and she slumped down onto the cobblestones as quietly as a mist melting away from the surface of a pond.”
Astounding, right?
The real kicker is that these beautiful words are directly from our first-person narrator, who represents the downstairs portion of the upstairs-downstairs scenario outlined in the story. It creates an interesting, and perhaps surprising, dichotomy.
The house in the front has the power and the prestige, but it’s our narrator in the house behind who has the voice.
And that’s quite a trick on Davis’s part.
The selection:
I saw it all from above. It happened very quickly and quietly. I did not do anything. For a while I did not even realize what I had seen: life is so uneventful back here that I have almost lost the ability to react. But there was also something arresting in the sight of it: he was a strong and well-made man, an experienced hunter, and she was as slight and graceful as a doe. His gesture was a classically beautiful one; and she slumped down onto the cobblestones as quietly as a mist melting away from the surface of a pond. Even when I was able to think, I did not do anything.
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