If there is a writer more closely associated with the modern short story, or for that matter with the “literary” movement of the 1980s than Raymond Carver I’d like to know who that is. Carver, who had his own George Orwell style “oh crap I’m about to die I think I’ll write a story” moment (“Errand”, which is about Anton Chekhov’s last days) is one of the few people whom you can read and immediately not only say “yep, that’s (insert author here) all right” and not follow that up with “and MAN is he annoying”*.
If you’ve never read Carver, well, I think that you should. He was the foremost proponent of the minimalist style of writing, a style that was first really flexed out I think by Hemingway but which was used by Carver to dizzying effect. Carver wrote stories like someone else might craft a poem – not a single word astray, most certainly not whole sentences, every single bit of narrative, every description portioned out grudgingly and therefore more meaningful. This style is very easy to parody but not easy at all to do well – the standard line I remember from writing classes concern the people who rattle off the brand names of the products their characters are buying so that the audience can transfer their stereotypes about said products onto that character.** His writing, sparse as it is, is exceedingly easy to read but at the same time you can also tell how much the man labored to find perfection with it.
One nice side effect of Carver’s minimalism is that it allowed him to portray characters who, to put it nicely, don’t intellectualize everything the way most characters you’ll read in narrative do. It’s hard to truly get this sense from a short snippet or two, but I’ll do my best. Here are a couple bits from the title piece of this collection:
On her last day in the office, the blind man asked if he could touch her face. She agreed to this. She told me he touched his fingers to every part of her face, her nose—even her neck! She never forgot it.
They’d married, lived and worked together, slept together—had sex, sure—and then the blind man had to bury her. All this without his having ever seen what the goddamned woman looked like. It was beyond my understanding.
There’s this general sense of unease regarding the protagonist and this blind man, unease revolving around a lot of deep and dark thoughts, but that’s just the thing – these thoughts exist in some sense that is more primitive than language and so there is a sense that to commit these vague idea-clouds into words changes and cheapens the whole experience. Instead, Carver shows the man’s surface thoughts – this is a man who, perhaps, has only ever really had surface thoughts – and how they interact. In the end, you as a reader are left to fill in a lot of information, but again, it exists, it’s just hidden a little bit, and one could argue that this method of narrative – I’ve heard it called the “iceberg” method because it implies a large mass beneath what you can see with the smallest possible amount of hints – is more realistic than the style which is arrogant enough to think that we can ever really understand what goes on inside another person’s mind.
A few years after his death, a few of Carver’s short stories were transformed into a movie by Robert Altman called Short Cuts that is also one of my favorites, albeit for different reasons. All in all, though, if you want to read Carver, and he’s worth reading, Cathedral is a great place to start. I can all but guarantee that it won’t be your last exposure to the man.
*In fairness, James Ellroy is like that as well, although other people are free to find him more annoying than I do.
**Which, okay, is sort of what Bret Easton Ellis does, but to be fair to Ellis a lot of that when he does it is ironic and/or supposed to make you generally aware of the character’s materialistic viewpoint.
A Book A Day, That's All We Ask 