Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What he'd be writing now, October 3, 2003
People who consider Raymond Carver to be a strictly minimalist writer should really read this book from cover to cover. What they will discover is a career on the cusp of change, just before the author's life was tragically cut short. The stories are presented in chronological order. The opening dozen stories or so are classics of minimalist style which reaches its peak with the devestating 3-page story "Little Things" in which a child is literally torn apart by its parents divorce. But Carver's tone and style changes in the stories that follow. "What We Talk About When We Talk about Love" and the gut-wrenching "So Much Water So Close To Home" take on a new level of story-telling where Carver gives us a more intimate look at his characters. The last two of the previously published stories are nothing like the earlier stories. In "Cathedral", a typical Carver married man--distant, cynical, and slightly smug--makes surprising contact with another human being, presumably for the first time, in the most unlikely of situations. It is almost a salvation. "A Good Small Thing" (which was a revision of an earlier story called "Scotty") is nothing less than a masterpiece. In Carver's earlier career, this story would have ended bitterly and, perhaps, indifferently. Instead, this story ends up with an astonishing flavor of hope, forgiveness, and even closure. The seven "New Stories" at the collection's end just drive home the fact that Carver was really moving forward or at least in a new direction. I defy anyone to read "Intimacy" or "Elephant" and say, "Typical minimalism." I would place a heavy bet that the reader would reply the same way I did, "Damn! Damn! Can you imagine what he'd be writing if he were still with us?" Damn. Rocco Dormarunno, Author of The Five Points
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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The best of Carver, January 18, 2000
Raymond Carver is unique among contemporary American men of letters in that he is known almost exclusively for his short stories. Though he published other books, most notably collections of his poetry, his real genius was in the abbriviated summation of ordinary human experience in the short prose form. This volume is a great introduction to Carver's stories because it represents a selection of his best work from every phase of his career. It is clear from the first story that his special gift is in somehow making a slice of life universal. His stories have hardly any plot and character is revealed rather than described. The essense of his character's lives are distilled into a few scenes wherein the reader can grasp a universe of unspoken meanings. The simplest things in Carver's hands take on a depth of meaning and a resonance that tends to haunt one long after the story is read. There is no overt artifice employed; the stories are deceptively simple. Yet all of these stories, like good poems, pack lots of meaning into a compressed form. His stories are not so much 'about' love, grief, deception, failure, longing and hatred as they are captured moments that embody these elements of the human condition and allow us to really feel what the characters feel. The very lack of exposition and detailed context is part of what makes these moments so powerful. Like a Rorschach ink blot, the short scenes depicted can call forth from each reader a variety of different interpretations and meanings. That is perhaps what is really great about these stories. Every reader can agree on the overt content, but no two are likely to agree about what they really mean, despite almost everyone having a strong emotional response to them. This is unique and superior writing that no lover of literature should miss.
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Carver loves his characters yet he's never sentimental, January 17, 2002
Raymond Carver has been compared, rightly, to Chekhov because of his ability to absorb the reader in a "small" story and say something profound about the human condition. Absent in Carver's stories are stereotypical characters. For example, in "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," we read a story about a heart surgeon, Mel McGuiness, who is obsessed with preaching the virutes of absolute love to his wife and two friends, another couple. As we read the story, we see evidence that Mel is the embodiment of the absence of love. He is imperious, bullying, dogmatic, control-obsessed, fearful of life. Yet Carver doesn't allow us to dismiss Mel so easily. As Mel pontificates on love and gets more and more drunk, we are afforded glimpses of Mel's profound wisdom, which shows that there are two Mels, a tyrant and a vulnerable searcher of truth, that are warring against each other. Mel, the searcher of truth, knows there is a more profound, permanent love than merely carnal or erotic passion. At one point in the story, he confesses, in a moment of drunkenness, that he is completely ignorant of life. We sympathize with Mel's passion for "ultimate love," yet we are at the same time appalled at Mel's bullying and vanity. Mel's character is indicative of the kind of complexities and contradictions that Carver dramatizes in his very readable stories.
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