Loving Wanda Beaver

My biased view: Baker touches into a kind of sincerity - often - after the problems work out. She writes with a lightness. A sense of charmed absurdity. As if all the characters were a bit nutty - but it's not that darkly serious. * * * Get hold of HOW I CAME WEST AND WHY I STAYED as well.

The title story was the one most distinctively Alison Baker. Her special talent is to highlight the absurdities of everyday life and the eccentricities of ordinary people without overstepping into Donald Barthelme fantasy. Hers is the craziness of the mundane and the comedy of the tragic. Her only other book is "How I Came West and Why I Stayed" and there's been nothing I know of from her in the last nine years, unless she's the same Alison Baker who wrote "The Impact of Filtration Techniques on Chlorophyll Determinations" (which does sound possible now I think of it ). I got least out of "Almost Home" but that may be because I always find the novella an irritating length. Also the impact of Alison Baker's wonderful opening sentences gets lost when a story is too long. It's 80 pages about a guy whose son has been killed and who has left his wife to live in the woods and commune with something or other. He does encounter a number of Alison Baker type people and animals (a homesick grizzly bear, an intrusive rooster, a bad cat, an elusive cougar, a runaway dog) but I thought the hand of Raymond Carver was heavy and there was too much fine writing like "soggy seedheads of last summer's fireweed and thistle" that uses botanical erudition to give a spurious air of exactitude.(Can you see that seedheads are soggy though a pair of binoculars?)