With most writers, you begin to feel, once you've read enough of their output, that you know and recognize their world. You even hear people say things like "the world according to Milton" or "the world according to Hemingway," and you have an idea what they're talking about. In the latter, for example, there is a war going on, either in the foreground (A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls) or in the background, which may be explicit ("Soldier's Home," "In Another Country") or unmentioned, "left out" but present ("Big Two-Hearted River," The Sun Also Rises). I've been rooting around in my paperback edition of Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and notice that, in a publisher's blurb, fellow writer Stanley Elkin illustrates the principle by enthusing, "I'm nuts about Raymond Carver's new stories. They're real as discount stores, time clocks, the franchises in small towns, bad marriages."
The point can be amplified, with respect to Carver, by noting how certain kinds of situations recur. Here's one. It's the middle of the night. Husband and wife are in bed. Wife has a lot of unspecified stuff rattling around her head and can't sleep. Husband has no trouble sleeping and so is oblivious to wife's almost desperate state of mind, the symptoms of which, though not the underlying cause, are described in a succession of simple, declarative sentences.
She looked in on the children. She pulled the covers up over her son's shoulders. She went back to the living room and sat down in the big chair. She paged through a magazine and tried to read. She gazed at the photographs and then she tried to read again. Now and then a car went by on the street outside and she looked up. As each car passed she waited, listening. And then she looked down at the magazine again. There was a stack of magazines in the rack by the big chair. She paged through them all.
That's from "The Student's Wife." At the end, she goes back into the bedroom, where her husband "looked desperate in his heavy sleep":
As she looked, the room grew very light and the pale sheets whitened grossly before her eyes.
In "I Could See the Smallest Things," the sleepless wife hears her open gate outside. She nudges her husband, who only groans. Then:
I stayed still awhile longer until I decided it was no use. I got up and got my slippers. I went to the kitchen and made tea and sat with it at the kitchen table. I smoked one of Cliff's unfiltereds.
It was late. I didn't want to look at the time. I drank the tea and smoked another cigarette. After awhile I decided I'd go out and fasten up the gate.
Outside, she sees her next door neighbor, in his pajamas, flashlight in one hand and bug poison in the other, crouching in the yard plantings, killing slugs. They have a brief conversation that is evocative of happier past times on both sides. He shows her a slug. When she goes back inside to bed, she gives her husband "a little shake" and
He cleared his throat. He swallowed. Something caught and dribbled in his chest.
The story closes with her connecting husband to slugs in the yard next door.
If Carver's career is divided into two phases--an early, "minimalist" one, in which the editor Gordon Lish figured prominently, and a late one that was cut short by his death, age 50, in 1988--then "The Student's Wife" and "I Could See the Smallest Things" both belong to the early phase. So does "The Bath," in which a young mother goes to a bakery and orders, from a not very sympathetic-seeming baker, a cake for her son's eighth birthday. Then, on the morning of the party, before the cake can be picked up, the boy is struck by a car while walking to school. The parents keep a vigil at the hospital. The boy slumbers in something like a coma, nothing happens, the reader along with the parents is subjected to the grim hospital world where tanned and well-dressed doctors speak evasively to frightened consumers of health care, and, finally, the mother goes home to take a bath. Soon as she's fed the dog, the phone rings:
"Yes!" she said. "Hello!" she said.
"Mrs Weiss," a man's voice said.
"Yes," she said. "This is Mrs Weiss. Is it about Scotty?" she said.
"Scotty," the voice said. "It is about Scotty," the voice said. "It has to do with Scotty, yes."
And that's the end of the story. This dead-fall of an ending, the telephone call of the baker, has an awful and desolating force that may put one in mind of the gate-knocking scene in Macbeth. (At dawn on the morning after the night of the murders, there is a knocking at the castle gate, which, considering what has just happened, should be the hand of God--but it turns out just to be some drunken revelers getting in late. The king's corpse, and those of his slumbering body guards, haven't even been discovered yet.) You don't perhaps realize the nightmare you've been sunk in till it collides with the mundane.
Now that I've compared him to Shakespeare, it remains to be said that Carver wasn't altogether happy with the "minimalist" stories collected in Will You Please Be Quiet Please and What We Talk About. In this interview--full of interest--he answered the question, "How has your work changed?"
I knew I'd gone as far the other way as I could or wanted to go, cutting everything down to the marrow, not just to the bone. Any farther in that direction and I'd be at a dead end—writing stuff and publishing stuff I wouldn't want to read myself, and that's the truth. In a review of the last book, somebody called me a “minimalist” writer. The reviewer meant it as a compliment. But I didn't like it. There's something about “minimalist” that smacks of smallness of vision and execution that I don't like. But all of the stories in the new book, the one called Cathedral, were written within an eighteen-month period; and in every one of them I feel this difference.
One of the stories in Cathedral is "A Small, Good Thing," which is a reworking of "The Bath." The new story is around three times longer, mostly because it continues forward in time. The redone first part is very similar, though you notice, if you put the two texts side-by-side, that most of the changes have a softening effect. For example, the doctors, while still tanned and well dressed, have not been dealt a natural void in the human sympathy suit. The boy, however, dies in the hospital. The numbed parents go home and realize it's the baker who keeps calling on the phone. He wants the money for his stale cake. Enraged, they drive to the mall where the bakery is located. It's in the wee hours of the night, everything is dark, and they are contemplating violence. The baker lets them into his well-lighted work place and the angry exchange we're expecting begins. But it comes out that the birthday boy has died and the baker's sullen demeanor falls away.
He looked at them, and then he shook his head slowly. He pulled a chair out from under the card table that held papers and receipts, an adding machine, and a telephone directory. "Please sit down," he said. "Let me get you a chair," he said to Howard. "Sit down now, please." The baker went into the front of the shop and returned with two little wrought-iron chairs. "Please sit down, you people."
And the story ends:
"Smell this," the baker said, breaking open a dark loaf. "It's a heavy bread, but rich." They smelled it, then he had them taste it. It had the taste of molasses and coarse grains. They listened to him. They ate what they could. They swallowed the dark bread. It was like daylight under the fluorescent trays of light. They talked on into the early morning, the high, pale cast of light in the windows, and they did not think of leaving.
Probably this comes on too strong. The way in which the accoutrements of the baker's financial interests--the receipts and the adding machine and the telephone directory he used to look up the numbers of delinquent customers--are swept to the side as he exercises himself to make the grieving parents comfortable: it's too obtrusive. Similarly with the blunt evocation of the Eucharist that ends the story. Yes, Raymond Carver, they are communing.
This ending, however, is another of the recurring situations, and in maybe Carver's finest story the effect is unspeakably powerful. This is "Cathedral," the title story, which can be read online here. It's about a visit--by a blind man to the home of the narrator and his wife. The blind man and the wife are great friends. They met when she worked briefly as his assistant, and on her last day, when they were parting, the blind man had asked whether he could touch her face with his hands. She had let him, and he had run his hands all over her face and neck. They hadn't "seen" each other since that day but had kept in touch through tapes sent back and forth in the mail. She had been through a divorce and a suicide attempt before marrying the narrator and the blind man had heard about it all on tapes. The narrator tells us he knows these things and he tells us how he knows them: she told him. Now the blind man's mother has died, so he's traveling, and he's going to come to their house. The narrator's wife is eagerly anticipating the visit, but he's not.
His wife drives to the train station to pick up the blind man. When she returns, the narrator describes how he watches his wife get out of the car, walk around to help the blind man, gently guides him, smiling and laughing, to the front door. You get the idea that the smiling and laughing is unusual, not something that happens a lot in this house. There are bare suggestions of constrained lives, lots of drinking, dead-end jobs, no kids. The wife, however, has prepared a nice meal. The narrator watches as the blind man eats with gusto. He does not turn down the offer of a drink, or of a refill. The trio repair to the living room with dessert. The narrator turns on the tv--not the usual entertainment of a blind man. But the tv is going. They smoke dope. The narrator notices that this too does not appear to be the blind man's usual pastime, but he's trying to be a good guest. The pot takes down the wife, who falls asleep on the couch. Now it's just the two men and the tv. The narrator feels uncomfortable. The tv show is about European cathedrals--sounds like PBS. He flips through the channels, but nothing seems better, and he lands back on the cathedral show. It occurs to him that the blind man might have no concept of cathedrals. He tries describing them in words but feels he fails. The blind man asks him whether it's okay to ask if he's religious. The narrator says he isn't religious. The blind man allows that he in fact doesn't have any conception of cathedrals but has an idea. What if the narrator helped him to draw one? The narrator finds materials, and the story winds down, the two men touching as the sighted one guides the hand of the blind man over the construction paper, their joined hands leaping up again and again for the spires, the narrator closing his eyes--"I thought it was something I should do"--and saying: "It was like nothing else in my life up to now."
[Originally posted as "Carver's World" on April 8, 2017.]