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The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 733 pages, $37.95

Lydia Davis is the Frenchest of all our fiction writers. She's a commander of white space, an expert at sly insinuation and the meticulous craftswoman of a self-deprecating introspection that always manages to seem more metaphysical than mundane. By "our" fiction writers, I mean not only those writing in English but the collective mass of all non-French writers; I mean any writers not native to France, to say nothing of all the actual French writers who are, in fact, less demonstrably French than Davis (herself born in Northampton, Mass.).

Davis is so quintessentially and undeniably French in her writing that she has been decorated by the French government, which named her something they call a "Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters." In France, she's a knight; in the United States, where she lives and works, she's the pre-eminent writers' writer, an embodiment of the literary esoteric, and a heroine of the humorously obscure. If there's a more perfect symbol of the cultural difference between France and the United States than that particular contrast, I don't know what it is.

Davis, who is also well regarded in academic and publishing circles for her French-to-English translations of major authors, including Marcel Proust, has little involvement with such conventions of mainstream U.S. fiction as plot or momentum; she's all about voice, all about style, all about the artfully rationalized extended rumination. In large part, it is this - her language-philosophy approach to fiction - that marks her so clearly, to North American readers, as Continental.

And yet, I would argue, Davis's Frenchness is shot through with good old-fashioned American ego: there's an individualistic "I" that persists through all her work, an "I" that is unmistakably of the New World.

Her Collected Stories, a hefty volume of more than 700 pages, contains, as promised, all the pieces from her previously published four books of short fiction, beginning with Break It Down (1986) and ending with Varieties of Disturbance (2007). As with any collection, the quality of the experience varies, but Davis is a stylistic virtuoso and so, on the rare occasions when I find my attention wandering, it's less from a lack of elegance in the stories than from a lack of urgency.

Obsessiveness and repetition are the retaining walls of Davis's voice, as important to her architecture as to Gertrude Stein's or Thomas Bernhard's, and generally serve her and her readers well. But now and then an obsession may tend to collect itself around a trifle.

The shortest pieces in the book, the few-sentence snatches that are essentially prose poems, range from humorous and expansive brevities like What She Knew: "People did not know what she knew, that she was not really a woman but a man, often a fat man, but more often, probably, an old man. The fact that she was an old man made it hard for her to be a young woman. It was hard for her to talk to a young man, for instance, though the young man was clearly interested in her. She had to ask herself, Why is this young man flirting with this old man?

Or clever and reductive brevities like Almost Over: Separate Bedrooms: "They have moved into separate bedrooms now.

"That night she dreams she is holding him in her arms. He dreams he is having dinner with Ben Jonson."

And then there are stories, particularly from Varieties of Disturbance, whose entireties are just one-liners playing off their own titles. Some of these make perfect marriages of wit and existential befuddlement, such as Mother's Reaction to My Travel Plans: "Gainesville! It's too bad your cousin is dead!"

Yet others in this one-liner series are smart-alecky, and all in all, by the high standards to which I hold Davis, relatively cheap shots, such as Index Entry: "Christian, I am not a."

But for each of the few times, in this remarkable collection, that Davis allows herself a quick shot at a couple of fish swimming around in a barrel, there are far more instances of an intriguing and rigorous intellect that commands us to follow it wherever it goes, over a course that's often meandering and arrow-sharp at once.

There aren't many literary writers now working in North America who play with the abstract and scrutinize the self at an ironic distance as funnily or smartly as Davis. More than any other contemporary short-story writer, she rescues the form from triteness and pedestrianism. Without her work, the living canon would be much poorer, as a perfect quartet of worshipful jacket blurbs from heavyweights Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Joyce Carol Oates and Rick Moody attests.

So, for those who haven't sampled Davis, and yet make so bold as to consider themselves well read, this collection is a smart pick. Davis is beloved of writers and reading intellectuals for very good reason, whether despite her Frenchness or because of it.

Lydia Millet's newest book is the story collection Love in Infant Monkeys.

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