Raymond Carver – "What we talk about..."- Review

My introduction to this American short story writer landed sometime in the mid-eighties. This collection, Will you Please be Quiet, Please, (1976) for me, was a different style of writing, close to Hemingway-ish, though Carver is more straight forward, closer to home, and much more realistic in its content. What we Talk about When We Talk about Love, (1981) portrays this realism in simple prose, the landscape is Northwestern America, and the characters, working-class folk, and who's problems we all can relate to in some form in our lives.

One finishes a story and is forced to pause because of appearance, the content in everyday life, slices of life, and mundane on the surface. One finds themselves rereading the story, to find the allusions and subtleties in the human condition.

A good example of this allusion and the subtleties in the human condition is the first tale of the rank, Why Don't You Dance? A middle-aged man is having a garage sale, evidently getting rid of a life once lived. From the reading, we can gather the man's whole life is on his driveway: bed, desk, TV, record player, and even his vinyl collection of obscure tunes. A young couple arrives and tests the bed and ends up turning on the television. 

The owner shows up with a bag containing a bottle of whisky and beer. The couple asks the man for the price of certain items like the bed and TV. From this exchange, we can tell the man is not too interested in making a profit, for he easily lets his property go for a steal. Later he offers them a glass of whisky and then puts on a record. The couple begins to dance, but the young man quits claiming he's too drunk. It's then the young lady, and the older man begins to dance, and from this scene, we can feel the connection. Taking this connection further, an image manifests of an old life ending and a new one just beginning. This is not blatantly stated, but Carver leaves it up for the reader to decide...

Again, Carver never tells the reader everything about the characters or the entire circumstances of the story's content, but leaves us to re-read, and fill in the blanks, thus touching us emotionally and finishing the story ourselves.

In Gazebo, we find a couple in the throes of alcoholism, giving up on life. Managers of a small hotel, they have locked themselves into one of the rooms, drinking and lamenting, to discover the man has been sleeping with the maid, and the woman cannot let this infidelity go. 

The woman remembers a time on their travels when they stop at home to ask for a drink of water. In the backyard is an old gazebo, weathered by time. They talk about the choices they have made through life, and if they were the right ones. The gazebo represents what could have been, and specifically, is it their choices that brought them to this fork in their relationship, or their alcoholism?

It's known that Carver was an alcoholic, but spent the last ten years of his life sober, making writing the most productive time in his literary career.

Raymond Carver has been called America's greatest short story writer. For this reader, this is true.