What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories

I like Raymond Carver's sparring use of words, and fine and subtle descriptions of details that insinuate the personality of the people in the stories. Each story seems to show one aspect of love - love to a friend, to pet, to children, to spouse, to mistress. The stories are often melancholic; I imagine that I would feel even stronger if I were to read them on a winter night.

I've been using this book in literature classes in Japan, and I have to say that these stories have lost none of their power in the twenty-odd years since they first appeared in book form. Carver was a master at presenting the disillusioned and the lost in terse, understated, colloquial English that still is as crisp and fine as when it was first minted. Like Hemingway, Carver developed a method to freight the simplest words and sentences with a depth of meaning that can skew the whole story in an unexpected way, even in the very last sentence. This takes craft and talent, both qualities that Carver exhibits in the highest degree.Some may find his choice of subject matter rather limited. His characters, too, often exhbit the same strengths and the same weaknesses (booze for instance)--and this may signal a kind of narrowness of vision to some. Certainly Carver does not have the breadth of a Tolstoy or a Doestoyevsky, or even of a Faulkner or a Hemingway--yet these limitations, I would argue, are also his greatest strengths. Though he does not have a universal sweep, Carver knows his territory well, and mines his subject in all kinds of fascinating ways. All in all, this book is a fine introduction to Raymond Carver's work. Carver's a champ in my book and I predict that some of these stories will find their way into the American canon right next to Melville, Poe, Emerson, and all the rest. What a chuckle for Ray when he looks down from his writer's heaven and notices the gold stamping on the spine!

I used to hate Carver. "Nothing happens in these stories!" I would say. "What does it MEAN, for God's sake?!" It took me a while to realise that Carver's genius isn't for the grand epiphany, the convoluted plot, or the surprise ending. His genius is for moments of pathos; for moments of carefully observed humanity; for human foibles unflinchingly, but never unkindly, revealed. You really have to read him for yourself to understand, but here's an example: the story "Gazebo", which is one of my favourites from this collection. The story works because what 'the gazebo' means to the couple in the story is something most of us have felt: a dream of future happiness that is now lost to us; lost because we don't see how we might escape the banality of our own lives; lost because we fail to see how close we are to achieving it, if only we could slightly change the way we see things, or the way we live. None of this is overtly stated in the story - and that's Carver's genius. It is simply implied by juxtaposition. Thematic statements and grand epiphanies undermine so many stories (even some of Carver's earlier ones) because they are embarrassing. I don't mean embarrassing for the writer, I mean embarrassing for us, the readers: to have these slightly pathetic, vaguely shameful, and yet very human moments which are recognisably our own shoved in our faces feels like an accusation, and one we understandably reject. But to have them placed before us, gently, apparently undeliberately, so that we might see them for ourselves is wonderful. It engages OUR powers of observation and reflection, not just the writer's. We see ourselves reflected there in the story, and it's a private moment of self-revelation, of self-understanding. And more often than not, this is NOT a life-changing experience for us. No, the effect is much simpler, more realistic and more honest. It's a feeling of: "Oh, thank God. Other people feel this way, too. I'm not alone." It's a moment of empathy, not of explanation. Carver gives us this gift many times, and so well. Go read everything he's written. Especially if you're interested in writing your own stories. Carver's small body of work has as much to teach us about writing as it does about our lives.

The question of authorship should be immaterial to the reading of this work. Do we care what was left out? Do we care who wrote which sentence? In the end, whatever the process that produced them, this collection contains some of the most tragically beautiful stories I've read. The prose is minimal, but masterfully minimal -- it feels like the stories form the briefest of forays across the skin of a giant animal, and though you can't tell exactly what the animal is, or where it is going, you know there is something vaguely wrong, deep down below. The style Carver employs means that the smallest of incidents become important in mysterious ways, as if each part of the story, no matter how seemingly insignificant, contains part of the clue to the whole. But because of the sparse nature of the work, the clues never sum to a complete solution -- I feel like these stories reside somewhere between the tiny fictions we invent for people we glance at in the street, and fully-fledged realism which doesn't leave us room for imagination. Carver takes this space and with deft touches makes it seem both familiar and strange. Can't say enough about him. If you aspire to writing short stories, this will either set the bar for you or make you want to give up...

Despite other reviews calling Raymond Carver 'the Hemingway of the trailer court', I am reminded of the quote by Nabokov concerning Hemingway...."Hemingway...bah! he writes books for boys!" Raymond Carver wrote about adults for adults... and, more to the point, the circumstances in which men and women find themselves when they are caught in ethical, mystical, and problematic situations that cry for release from the heart-wrenching tasks of showing compassion, friendship, and love in the willingness to choose, when faced with difficulty and despair.

Raymond Carver's friend Tobias Wolff (see Carver's essay on his friendship with Wolff and Pulizer Prize winner Richard Ford in Carver's collection NO HEROICS,PLEASE) said that when he read the short story "Cathedral" for the first time he had the feeling he was levitating off the couch where he was stretched out reading. I had the same response to this essential work WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT LOVE as I emerged from my college library where I should have been studying, but was transfixed by this book I had just picked up by chance the day before. I had the feeling that I was floating across the campus toward the cafeteria for my evening meal after reading this book in one sitting. Who is Raymond Carver? Who is this guy ?, I kept saying to myself, feeling that all the persons and places I passed just NOW were the loveliest things I'd ever seen. How could anyone make me feel like that? I'm still wondering today and that was fourteen years ago! I might talk about Raymond Carver in very sophisticated terms today but my initial primal response still seems inexplicable. I have read everything I could get my hands on that Carver ever wrote or said, but this is the book in which Carver captured the solitary American experience at its heartfelt core. It shows what happens to us, the price we pay for our dreams , loves, and terrors. Or what is, perhaps, as the American poet Michael Palmer has characterized it: the "psychic cost of the American project." Carver wrote this book in the late 1970's just after alcoholism nearly killed him and he had given up everything just to SURVIVE (including, he thought back then, any sense that he might ever write again). My recommendation goes beyond the fact that this is my first and favorite Carver book. Why? This is it! This is where he did it. He stripped the prose here to its poetic core , and it was a wager, a Mallarmean throw of the dice; he would or would not write again with this book. The stories individually are astonishing, but together they become something larger, and more harrowing , and "dynamic". The stories turn into a work, That uniquely human thing we construct with our HANDS from whatever materials are there for us. Carver's whole life and attention are here , and whatever price he paid for that strange attentiveness which was uniquely his own (he's called called it "vision" in one of his essays from FIRES) it came together( ALL of it nearly) here in these pages. It is Carver, more than perhaps anyone else who did this kind of writing in the 70's and 80's who gave me the revelatory sense I have of what I would wish to care for most in my life . And how I might begin that difficult task every day that is given me. CARE. Carver must have loved that word. As the poet Robert Duncan has pointed out: "All the events, things and beings, of our life move then with the intent of a story revealing itself."