Customer Reviews

Stories Of Raymond Carver: A Critical Study

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've perused all of the critical work and this book outshines them all -- by at least 300 per cent. It's engaging, penetrating, well-developed and lucid, and written humanely no less, with much flair and elan. What a refreshing read, considering the arid critical deserts one often wanders. Nesset explores all of Carver's major volumes of stories, discussing selected stories in each while touching on others, and reflecting on Carver's poems here and there to good effect, using them as signposts and touchstones. If you've ever felt baffled by those bare, darkest stories, feel baffled no more. Carver's craft, his magic, is revealed in this book -- revealed from first page to last in that most illuminating, helpful, and respectful of ways.

Nesset, whose near-obsessive interest with Carver provides many insights, manages to do what few serious critical inquiries do: entertain while he enlights. And, as anybody who has read some of Nesset's own fiction can attest, what he has learned from a master has not been lost on the student.

This is the study on Ray Carver I've been looking for. Excellent! Very smart, super smart, and still readable. A great aid for teaching Carver's fiction, or for writing about it, or for just understanding its intricacies, of which there are many, as Nesset demonstrates. Great book!

Thanks to Kirk Nesset for writing a study that's EXCITING TO READ even while thoughtful and smart and interpretively right on the money. Who said writing about writers and writing had to be boring? This is the book I've been wanting to find!

An excellent review of the style of Carver's stories that was written by one of his most prudent of critics.

I must admit, I did have some trouble with Mr. Nesset's book. All and all I found the book very entertaining, but I am not convinced for one second that Raymond Carver made a conscience effort to add all the symbols to his stories that Mr. Nesset claims he did. As a fiction writer myself, it is hard enough to just put the words on paper without making a conscience effort at turning every single thing and detail into a symbol relating to the story. I am curious as to whether Carver himself said that the man without hands in "Viewfinder" represented the man's feelings of seperation (dismemberment) from his family. Or if the man throwing rocks from the roof and being captured in a blurred frame from the Poloroid is representive of the man's current state of confusion. I mean, come on, Mr. Nesset, give us a break here. I've always been taught to create memorable characters--and what's more memorable than a man without hands coming to your house to snap photographs of it. Are these figments of your creative imagination or actually Carver's conscience attempts at cramming his stories full of symbols? Also, in the story "Chef's House," why does the wedding ring being tossed into the peach orchard have to be representative of the last falling fruit in a failing marriage? Maybe Carver was eating a peach as he wrote the story. Ever consider that one? All joking aside, I found this book entertaining and enlighting and would recommend it to any Carver fan, but I would, however, read it lightly. Acadamia and fiction writing don't mix. Critics, for the most part, are people who wish they could write fiction. Those who can do. If you're a scholar on an author, you're not that author, and if you're a scholar and an author, than you can't be good at both. So, read Carver's stories for what they are: just simple stories about down trodden people. And don't fool us into believing Carver considered each minute detail he put in his stories. Besides, I once read in an interview with Carver that the black man in his story "Vitamins" was incorporated into the work because he received a wrong-number phone call from what he suspected was a black man while he was writing the story. So is that a symbol or something else? Thank you, J. Michael Campbell.