In his calloused hands, with dirt under his fingernails, he carried the same torch that Wordsworth and Coleridge had used to set poetry aflame. Raymond Carver employed "the language really used by men" to tell the story of the damaged white...
[more]In his calloused hands, with dirt under his fingernails, he carried the same torch that Wordsworth and Coleridge had used to set poetry aflame. Raymond Carver employed "the language really used by men" to tell the story of the damaged white American. Broken hearts populate Carver's literary country; they hide out in the wood-paneled camouflage of middle-class American homes, where sticky liquor bottles crowd kitchen shelves and yellowing baggage occupies the garage. These characters are tougher than they know, ignorant of their own resilience, and blind to the pitched battle they wage against loneliness. Though they continually suffer from alcoholism, divorce, and domestic violence, their stories do not approach the level of melodrama; these divorcees, drunks, and adulterers are as mundane, ordinary, and pathetic as day-old white bread.
Carver's narratives reveal no obvious sympathy for these folks, but they do not try to keep the reader from weeping at their miserable lives. Carver practices a strangely sweet form of pessimism. There is a tenderness in his tone, a sincerity in his characters' struggles, a gentle undercurrent that counterbalances the starkness of the settings.
In "What We Talk about When We Talk about Love," a foursome polishes off two bottles of gin while the late afternoon succumbs to night and conversation moves from a casual dissection of love to desperate anecdotes of loss. The friends, paralyzed by their pasts, are imprisoned by domesticity and the lure of drink. They literally cannot leave the kitchen table, not to make a phone call, not to prepare the crackers and cheese. By the story's end, this tension becomes unbearable. Carver constructs a cliff on top of a fault line and leads his characters right to the precarious edge.
James Dickey wrote: "Carver's stories have tremendous force, the power of a connecting left hook when the fist is filled with a roll of coins. Such an impact cannot be shaken off." The surprise is that Carver achieves this impact with indirect minimalism -- he refuses to budge beyond the construction of a conversation or the description of two strangers in a quiet room. His stories carry no obvious symbolic, philosophical, or psychoanalytic subtexts; they are as "real" as the mattress beneath an aching back. In a way, Carver merely paints the painful silence that is the backdrop for most significant human interaction. He trusts that the graveyard of memory will accurately fill in the emotional details.
"It's strange," he wrote, "You never start out life with the intention of becoming bankrupt or an alcoholic or a cheat and a thief. Or a liar." But we fall into such straits nonetheless, he implied. In fact, the general sentiment among readers is that Carver's stories make them want to ruin their lives in order to find a legitimate place in his world. His stories are that simple, horrible, and beautiful.
After a 50-year life strewn with mixed blessings, Carver, himself a recovering alcohol and lung cancer victim, reportedly kissed his wife goodnight before falling asleep and waking up dead.
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