Dilettante reader that I am, I abandon books without regret, often after fifty pages, bored by their banality, loquacity, or simply tired of their particular contrivance. But with Lydia Davis’s The End of the Story I persisted despite resistance to its flat, controlled prose. Davis’s recounting of obsession is the antithesis of Chris Kraus’s bitter I Love Dick or Ferrante’s woozy The Days of Abandonment.

Something more interesting is going on in The End of the Story, less lamentation and more microscopic scrutiny of obsession from within the possessed mind of the narrator. Davis unearths the powers of images which shape and order a particular type of madness. After about a hundred and twenty pages, I found the particular rhythm of Davis’s dispassionate prose. As in trauma, numbness is not the absence of a reaction; the numbness is the reaction.

Understanding this enabled me to better make sense of Davis’s description of the shaping of an obsession. It is concerned with this imaginary landscape from which we view our relationships with the other, particularly those complicated by eroticism. The narrator’s insistence to persevere with a novel about her obsession recalls Bataille’s announcement in his Nietzsche book: “Motivating this writing-as I see it-is a fear of going crazy.”