I don’t recall what drew me to Raymond Carver’s writing, but I recently acquired the Library of America anthology of his short stories, and finished Carver’s first published collection: Will You Please be Quiet, Please? (hereafter: WYPBQP).
I also borrowed a copy of Sklenicka’s biography of Carver, which was an essential aid in understanding the stories. Many of them draw from Carver’s own life experiences, and recognizing the correspondences was enriching.
Carver was obsessed with writing, and storytelling. As a young man, he pursued that goal relentlessly. He was a keen observer, using settings, events, and details drawn from his life to animate his stories. His personal life and struggles radiate from them. Many details are so brilliant that they seem to reflect the very aspects of life that birthed them.
These details and personal touches add weight to his writing. None of his stories are abstract or untethered: they’re grounded and deeply realistic. You might call them “gritty”. While this does apply to some of the darker moments in the collection, it feels inexact as a descriptor for the work as a whole. Grittiness is often performative, an imitation of a world you observe from afar, a kind of authorial voyeurism. While Carver’s realism can be dark, it remains pervasively honest. The suffering his stories portray feels earned. You really feel like Carver has lived through their painful moments. While the turmoil of the stories is sometimes manifest, the harshness is mostly implied. A muted perception of pain pervades the stories, with a similar timbre to our own troubled moments in life.
Carver’s subject is, for the most part, family life: being in a couple, having moments of stress, difficulty, or unease with life. There are a handful of stories about other settings, but even these are drawn from other periods in his life, or from his own observations.
His stories can be weird.
The opening story, Fat, is about a strange and corpulent diner who refers to himself as “we”, and eats for a party of 4. This character seems to have been drawn from an encounter his wife, Maryann, had as a waitress.
In Neighbors, a couple develops a curious obsession with friends they house-sit for. This story stands out from the others in the collection, in that imagination and fantasy are centered as the dramatic core, rather than more mundane elements.
Despite the grounded nature of his stories, Carver does manage to include a healthy dose of imagination, in other ways. He employs creative license, of course, embellishing details, imagining actions he could have taken, and fleshing out strangers into complete characters. Carver has a genius for relating personal experience from another person’s viewpoint. He can tell a story from his own life through the perspective of another. He might portray a husband as seen by his wife, or a child as seen by an adult. This is crucial to Carver’s style. He has a mastery of perspective, and uses the focusing power of the short story to provide an emotional séance with is narrative character. Rather than directly narrating a character’s emotions, he often lets an ambient mood express them. You feel in tune with the character’s feelings by dwelling with them, which is more powerful than a mere description.
An amazing example is in Sixty Acres. Carver’s experience hunting duck with a family friend as a child, and occasionally trespassing on Native land, is turned around to be told from the Native perspective. We get a subtle story of confrontation, pride, and shame. The protagonist’s sense of pride over his land, and dread of losing it is presented with precision; faint cues whisper these feelings throughout the story, rather than loudly proclaiming them with brash description.
Carver’s stories are minimalistic. Flowery details, sprawling descriptions, vivid prose, such elements are discarded in favor of a matter-of-fact outlook. This voice is Carver’s own. He relates experiences and imagined stories as he sees them. Nonetheless, they do not lack color. They have emotion, just in natural doses. You might feel these emotions through glimpses, in the same way that you don’t go out in the world seized by feeling, but rather focused on the happenings around you. Life does bring important moments, where emotions bubble up, but often these come as the accumulation of many moments of small feeling. Carver’s writing captures these mundane tones of life.
The power of Carver’s writing is carried through the impression an entire story can leave. Rather than having audacious moments, we get a sense of the story’s mood. We sit with it, feeling it bit-by-bit, and then look back on it with a deep connection to its themes. Looking back at the collection as a whole, it imparts upon me the feelings one might have after a rough night. You feel the weight of a long night, its pains, but the sun creeps out at you, reminding you of all the life you have in you still.