I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what gives Davis’s stories such strange and, at times, startling force. Her work, which often consists of brief stories made up of seemingly mundane observations, resists classification and is especially immune to explanatory jibber-jabber. In a universe drowning in words, Davis is a respite. What she doesn’t say is as important as what she does. Here is the entire text of a story called “Housekeeping Observation”:

Under all this dirt

the floor is really very clean.

I read this and I imagine a character, the sort of person who would think it up. I see an entire scene, a cluttered kitchen, a filthy floor and a lone individual standing with a triumphantly useless mop planted like a flag on the linoleum.

Image Lydia Davis Credit... Theo Cote

Others might blow by it and say, well O.K., nice couple of lines, but they aren’t, you know, a story. A story has to have such and such elements, you know, to be a story. In the name of purity, literary police officers may relegate this very short piece and other one- or two- or three-page stories scattered throughout “Can’t and Won’t” to something less than stories, call them short-shorts or micro-fiction, or something known as “flash,” or any of the other labels meant to reinvent what has long been invented. The wonderful thing about narrative is how elastic and wildly various it can be, and very short stories have been around since any other sort of story. In my copy of the Old Testament, God pulls off Adam and Eve in under a page. Not a piece of ephemera. What I’ve always appreciated about Davis is that she ignores any and all cramped notions about what is and is not a story, and her work has always freed up readers to conjure their own lasting, offbeat visions.

Is this small kitchen surrender a masterpiece? No, and it’s not meant to be. “Housekeeping Observation” exists alongside stories that have far more emotional impact because this collection is as mercifully flawed and awkward as her characters themselves. Call Lydia Davis the patron saint of befuddled reality. In the same book is “The Seals,” a story so grief-soaked you want to look away but can’t. It’s about the death of a sister, and it ranks with the finest stories she’s written, up there with “A Few Things Wrong With Me” or “Kafka Cooks Dinner.” In “The Seals” the loss is giant, incalculable, unspeakable. There is nothing nuanced about it. Davis goes longer here, and the effect is all the more moving because she needs words to say what she knows they can’t. Silence isn’t an option. There are times when only words — imperfect, often even hollow — can do anything at all to ease the emptiness. On a train to Philadelphia, the narrator talks to herself, gropes for some way to articulate the fact that her sister is gone, period, gone. How do we endure these losses, every day, these losses? Through the very words that will always fail us:

“Maybe you miss someone even more when you can’t figure out what your relationship was. Or when it seemed unfinished. When I was little, I thought I loved her more than our mother. Then she left home.”

Davis’s books more fully mirror (and refract) the chaos of existence than safer, duller, more homogeneous collections precisely because the stories aren’t consistent in tone, subject matter, length, depth or anything else. Neither are we consistent. One moment you can’t decide where to sit on the train, the next you find yourself staring squarely into the abyss. What Davis is attempting to express is the wild divergence of human experience, how the ordinary and the profound not only coexist but depend on each other. Thus a memory of a beloved sister falling asleep in front of the TV, the lamplight on her hair, cuts to the soul. Sixty years ago Eudora Welty wrote in these pages of J. D. Salinger’s “uneven” book “Nine Stories” that “no writer worth his salt is even, or can be.”