To be fair, I’m a sucker for stories about writers, and even more so the nerdy sub-branch where a writer places themselves within a story and/or brings attention to the constructedness of what we’re reading. Metafiction, as this kind of thing is known, can go wrong in so many ways. It’s a slippery slope to pretentious, navel-gazing drivel (which sums up how many of my fellow Bacchus Marsh goons felt about The End of the Story!). Also, so much of the power of fiction relies on our ability to suspend disbelief, to experience what we’re reading in the moment as being ‘real’. To undercut that by reminding us that we’re reading a story is a risky move. But I was fascinated by the way Lydia Davis goes about it.

One of my all-time favourite novels is Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. (I wasn’t in TGBC yet when we read it, but god I would’ve loved the chapter chat.) The book fictionalises O’Brien’s experiences as an American soldier in the Vietnam War in playful and super interesting ways. The Things They Carried and The End of the Story are radically different books, but many of the questions Davis poses reminded me of O’Brien’s great novel. Questions like: How reliable is memory? Where does biography end and fiction begin? Is the past stable and unchanging, or alive and constantly being rewritten? Can facts alone adequately convey the enormity of an experience? To what extent are all of us engaged in continual acts of self-mythology in the stories we tell about ourselves? And perhaps most importantly for The End of the Story: can this storytelling mode – in all its confusion and obsessive spiralling – give a more honest account of what it’s like to live through a breakup? More honest, say, than the rom-com approach of Good Material, the other recent TGBC breakup book? I reckon so. 

Bonus points for how self-incriminating the writer-protagonist of The End of the Story is. By the time we hit stalker territory in the second half of the book, it’s an incredibly unflattering portrait of her behaviour following the end of the relationship. In other breakup narratives there’s often a sense of finger-pointing, and lack of self-awareness as to a character’s own role in the dysfunction of the relationship (thinking here of Andy from Good Material). But there’s none of that in The End of the Story. The writer-protagonist is self-aware alright, highlighted by her frank ruminations on her selfishness. In fact, there’s a case to be made that the love of her life isn’t the younger man, or Vincent, but her writing. Seen this way, her relationship with the younger man is simply her Good Material, an experience to be mined in the name of her writing. It might explain why we’re given so little as to what actually made this relationship special to her.

Then there’s the shadow that lingers over the entire novel – to what extent is the writer-protagonist a stand-in for Lydia Davis? It’s a dicey question to ask of any work of fiction, and one I’m not normally keen on, but to my mind Davis encourages it here. Like her protagonist, Davis is a translator as well as a writer of prose fiction. The decision not to name her protagonist and the young man certainly plays into the murkiness, as does the novel’s documentary/diary entry style. It’s another can of worms for a novel that poses so many questions.

What I love about TGBC is the variety of books we get to chat about. This was a divisive one in my chapter, but it’s a book I’m so glad I had the opportunity to read.

Wayne Marshall (Bacchus Marsh chapter)