What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

Raymond Carver, the 'American Chekhov' as he so regularly gets dubbed, is a recent discovery for me. Perhaps because I'm just battling with my own attempts at short stories, it's particularly meaningful for me to find such a master. But more than likely, it's the fact that Carver manages something rather spectacular without even appearing to try to.


His stories, all set in the American mid-west, focus on ordinary lives of ordinary people. Or so it first appears. But scratch beneath the surface of any given story, and one sees that these people are extraordinary, that the events of their lives, even if they are described in the simplest, most unadorned prose, are tragic or epic. This is the real mind-blowing strength to Carver's work: his style, so unaffected and straightforward, only heightens the implicit drama of the scenes he describes.


Take 'Why Don't You Dance?', in which a man has moved all his furniture out onto his drive and gets a young couple drunk, or 'Gazebo', which opens with the line 

That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

In both instances, one rushes to try to come to terms with the fact that these people aren't all right, that their simple lives, so simply told, are shot through with a hidden suffering. Or even the suffering need not be hidden. In 'Sacks' or 'The Bath', we read of the painful reunion of a son with his estranged father and of a road accident on the eve of a young boy's birthday. Both times I was struck by how it seemed somehow unfair that regular folk were suffering like this. It's a masterful, terrifying observation. It's Carver at his best.


There's the macabre too. 'Tell the Women We're Going' leads the reader along a familiar path, until one realises that one character's reticence is not that he's just a quiet man, but that he hides a horrific secret. Or 'The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off', a record of the decline of a good man before his son's eyes. But 'Popular Mechanics' bests them both for its intensity and agony. In the briefest of moments Carver has captured domestic struggle at its most violent and destructive. But he has not sensationalised it; he never does. He's packaged it up in a mere two pages of dialogue and action that seem so concise and factual but only emphasise the enormous tragedy of the scene. There's skill even in the titling, with 'Popular' hinting that we are reading something that happens regularly, that we should understand to be happening around the world. That's scary. That's great writing, to pose a question so succinctly. 


I'll read these again. Carver gets it right again and again. 


~~~
1981
Raymond Carver