Lydia Davis Loved Learning the Word ‘Look.’ These Essays Show Why.

She is our Vermeer, patiently observing and chronicling daily life but from angles odd and askew. “Essays One” is her first collection of nonfiction, with pieces dating back to the 1970s, mainly concerning writing and writers. (A second volume will be devoted to translation.) The book allows us backstage, into the creation and revision of her stories, her notes on her influences: Beckett, Babel, Paley, Kafka. A few pieces offer straightforward writing advice. “A train, or in fact any public transportation,” she counsels, “is often a very good place to think and write.”

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Davis’s earliest memories of reading involve the Dick and Jane books. “I loved learning the words ‘look’ and ‘see,’” she has said. “‘Run, Jane, run. See Jane run.’ It was so clear and easy and unconfusing and neat.”

These pieces exalt clear language and the complicated work of looking and seeing. “Maybe the notebook is a place to practice not only writing but also thinking,” she wonders in an essay about the labor that goes into revising a single sentence. In her notes, we see her honing her habit of attention, her sensitivity to shades of meaning and the music of language, her tropism toward writers with a talent for noticing. “She was always watching, even if only out the window,” she writes in an appreciation of the story writer Lucia Berlin. “A writer’s embrace of the world is all the more evident when she sees the ordinary along with the extraordinary, the commonplace or the ugly along with the beautiful.”

Davis takes pure pleasure in the muscular act of looking, and invites us to look alongside her. She presents long passages of text for our inspection, like X-rays, teaching us to read Jane Bowles, for instance, clause by clause. She examines tourist photographs of the Netherlands from the early 20th century, pointing out on one page the surprised, slightly suspicious look of children confronted with a camera; on another, the lovely, strong arms of a young girl carrying fish to market.

Davis returns to a series of virtues repeatedly: clarity, compression, frank emotion, oddness. She has a preference for overheard speech, “tangled, yet correct, syntax,” and, very often, for writing that reinterprets a text or pokes fun at conventional, sentimental writing. The book itself embodies these qualities with its commentaries on writers and its puckish awareness of its own genre — those valedictory sermons on craft from the established writer, those moist and vague maunderings on the virtue of “storytelling.”