What people talk about when they talk about Raymond Carver
Biographer Carol Sklenicka provides a Carver primer
Raymond Carver, hard at work.
Raymond Carver was a true literary stylist, though few authors have had their names as closely linked to their idiosyncrasies as he did. Carver's short stories used spare, stark prose to chronicle the lives of the middle class—so effectively, in fact, “Carver-esque” is now commonplace literary shorthand for describing any minimalist. But using fewer words doesn't steer a writer away from complexity, as Carol Sklenicka finds in the biography Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life. It's an exhaustive 592-pager offering a stockpile of minutiae about one of the most influential short-story writers in American history. In advance of Sklenicka’s reading at Magers & Quinn on Sunday, Nov. 29, The A.V. Club asked her to provide a primer for this literary heavyweight.
Why all the fuss?
There’s a reason Carver’s work is almost universally beloved. He wrote about common folk in a way that made it easy for readers to connect with him. He understood that a refrigerator breaking down could be the kind of major event that prevents a person from making rent. “He saw how people’s economic lives are connected to everything else,” Sklenicka says. “And he was able to compress entire lives into a six- or 10-page story. Readers connect viscerally and feel like they know these people.”
But those sentences are so boring. There are hardly any semicolons.
Carver could pick perfect representational details, making his stories easy to relate to on a literal level. His work is no less weighty or valuable simply because he didn’t write in discursive thought patterns and maximalist prose. “Because of what I was writing, my book club requested I bring Carver,” Sklenicka says. “And they loved him! I was surprised, but really, the only group he’s hard to sell to are the pure modernists.”
Carver’s described as a “dirty realist.” That’s bad, right?
Granta magazine first foisted that label on him in 1983. The lit mag grouped Carver with Tobias Wolff and Richard Ford as authors who not only went against the grain of ’60s experimentalists like Donald Barthelme and John Barth, but even those realists like John Updike whose worlds were equally vivid, though far more pretty. “It’s kind of a classist designation, but it’s not negative,” Sklenicka says. “The term celebrates writers who had no issues getting their hands dirty while discussing real problems.”
What if I’m so busy I only have time to read three stories?
Start with “They’re Not Your Husband,” in which Carver makes a sympathetic case for Doreen Ober and her jerky husband, Earl. After you’re done, watch Tom Waits and Lily Tomlin play them in a segment of Robert Altman’s adaptation, Shortcuts. “Of the people I talked to who knew Carver, they said Waits’ and Tomlin’s portrayals were a lot like the relationship between Carver and his first wife. It was their favorite part of the movie,” Sklenicka says.
From there, move on to one of his most celebrated and funniest stories, “Cathedral." End with “Boxes,” a story that in many ways is the torchbearer for the ordinary lives that fascinated Carver. “It’s full of dirty realism, and the main scene concerns a mother and son having to use up all the food in her fridge before she moves out of her rental house,” Sklenicka says.
I heard Carver’s crazy editor, Gordon Lish, eviscerated his stories. Should I care?
Not really. Carver and Lish became friends when they worked as textbook editors, and later Lish ended up being Carver’s editor at Esquire, the first high-profile magazine to publish Carver's work. Later, Lish edited the collections Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Much has been written about how Lish might have edited the vision out of Carver's stories, but Sklenicka mostly dismisses it. “Lish shouldn’t be painted as a bad guy," she says. "Editors make good work better. Although I do think he went over the line with What We Talk About.” Also influencing the narrative of their relationship are Carver’s anguished letters to Lish about his edits. Sklenicka says it’s important to remember Carver had recently quit drinking around that time, and his emotional state was tenuous at best. Even though they eventually parted ways professionally, the two remained friends. “If you’re simply looking for good things to read," Sklenicka says, "you don’t have to be concerned about this at all.”
