The Stories of Raymond Carver: A Critical Study. - book reviews

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1997 by Marshall Bruce Gentry

THE STORIES OF RAYMOND CARVER: A CRITICAL STUDY by Kirk Nesset. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995. ix 134 pages. $34.95 cloth; $14.95 paper.

This book devotes just over 100 pages to an Introduction and a series of four chapters devoted to Raymond Carver's major story collections, taken up in chronological order. Notes, an index, and an 11-page bibliography of sources as recent as 1993 fill out the volume. Although several books on Carver have already appeared, Kirk Nesset describes his study as "a preliminary exploration and assessment of Carver's fiction, as any first full-scale critical investigation of an author should be." While Nesset produces original readings of some stories, and while some parts of this study have been published previously in scholarly journals, most of his energy goes into presenting the critical consensus on Carver's stories. With the exception of conservative critics who have expressed negative attitudes toward Carver's treatment of American society under the influence of Ronald Reagan, Nesset rarely disagrees with other critics.

While Nesset's description of his critical stance as "formalist, New Critical in a postmodern-modernist, if old-fashioned way," may at first seem merely comical, such a stance makes sense if one agrees that Carver practices a "new realism" that is "a kind of post-postmodern modernism." The point is that Carver looks back to such realists as Hemingway and Anderson while also sharing some concerns of postmodern writers like Barthelme and Coover. Nesset also compares Carver to Chekhov and, less predictably, to Kafka.

Perhaps the best word to describe Nesset's readings is careful. He provides extended discussions (usually between three and five pages) of over 20 stories, and shorter discussions of numerous others. In Chapter One, discussing Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, Carver's first major collection, Nesset emphasizes the variety in Carver's stories and his treatment of love as "sickness" and concludes that sex and silence can be good for Carver's characters. Nesset struggles to generalize that Carver can maintain hope for his characters. The fragility of these claims strikes this reader as, in contrast, evidence for seeing Carver's characters' lives as unrelievedly despairing:

They talk, however unsuccessfully; they have sex, or avoid it. They

employ both their bodies and tongues in efforts to find themselves

again, struggling to reassemble the, bits and pieces of their tattered

identities, and they continue struggling, even as, their bodies get

them into trouble and their tongues, taking them forever in circles,

fall silent.

In discussing What We Talk About Men We Talk About Love in Chapter Two, Nesset predictably argues that Carver should not be called minimalist, but also provides detailed descriptions of the techniques that make this book Carver's most menacing--and most like what critics consider minimalism. I have two quibbles with this chapter. First, it is probably incorrect to claim that in avoiding metaphorical meaning Carver is following Flannery O'Connor's example in "Good Country People," in which "a wooden leg is finally an empty, innocuous object." My second and more important quibble is that Nesset too easily concludes that Carver manages to avoid dominating his characters; the complicated issue of his characters' freedom from authorial power deserves more discussion.

Chapters Three and Four, on Cathedral and the new stories in Where I'm Calling From, respectively, seem intended to reinforce the usual interpretation of Carver's career as one in which he expanded beyond the limitations of what is called his minimalist work and wrote longer, better stories. But even as Nesset points to signs of more hopefulness, more understanding and articulateness on the part of Carver's characters, he is careful not to claim that the final stories reveal Carver to be finally an optimist. Carver's personal life became happier before he died, but he never gave up the obsessions that drove his earliest work. Nesset's book leaves open the question of which portion of Carver's writing career will eventually seem most nearly representative.