Showing Signs

Yes, I do take requests . . . Today it's Raymond Carver's story "Signals" from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by special request of Alison Smith's literature class in Shepparton, Austraila.

As coincidence would have it, among the few books that weren't boxed up for my move was Maryann Burk Carver's recently published memoir What It Used to Be Like: A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver (I'll try to get a review up soon). Coincidence—synchronicity?—because just the day before Alison's email arrived (thank you) I was reading about how in the mid-60's Maryann had worked at a gourmet restaurant called the Flambe Room and the co-owner and maitre'd was named Aldo, just as in "Signals." Quite interesting to see how Carver uses and transforms the real into fiction.

Originally published under the title "A Night Out," and despite having been selected for the Pushcart precursor The Best Little Magazine Fiction in 1971, "Signals" was not selected by Carver for Where I'm Calling From. I'd second his opinion that the story is not among his best, especially when compared with the story that precedes it in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, which is "What Is It?" (later titled "Are These Actual Miles?). But, as with all Carver stories, it is tightly crafted and pays for close study.

Carver was a master of Show vs. Tell. Indeed, the much maligned minimalism that so many critics harp on is rooted in his commitment to show the characters in action while withholding interiority and avoiding authorial reporting. "Signals" fits that model perfectly. With the exception of the story's first sentence and the one-sentence third paragraph, there are no authorial reports and no character interiority. The story is all scenes to be interpreted by the reader.

First let's deal with the authorial reports. The story begins:

As their first of the extravagances they had planned for that evening, Wayne and Caroline went to Aldo's, and elegant new restaurant north a good distance.

Aldo does what a good maitre'd does and then the author reports: "They were pleased with his attention." Those two sentences are it for the telling in the story. So, what do we know? We know they've traveled a "good distance" for the "first of the extravagances they had planned for that evening" and after being seated "they were pleased" with the "attention" they had received from the maitre'd. That's not a heckuva lot of information. At this point in the story Carver stops telling and resorts to the camera and microphone; while eavesdropping on the conversation he gives us only screenplay like camera-shot directions/views.

So, what does Carver show? Let's take it section by section. First we see Wayne and Caroline gossiping about Aldo's work history and connections, with Wayne noting Aldo's expensive suit. Then we see Wayne's confusion and displeasure at the menu items in French, and finally his dismissal of the waiter: "I'll signal you when we're ready."

The second section features a brilliant escalation as Carver shows Wayne getting progressively more irritated—they could have had a better table; Caroline lingering over the menu after deciding; the waiters standing around talking—and then, after ordering a "domestic" bottle of champagne, he gets put in his place as Caroline corrects him:

   "And we'll have that right away. Before the salad or the relish plate," Wayne said.
   "Oh, bring the relish tray, anyway," Caroline said. "Please."
   "Yes, madam," the waiter said.

In the third section we see the subtext bubble to the surface. The champagne arrives and with Wayne's toast we learn that it is Caroline's birthday. And here's where the difference between showing and telling counts. In the story's opening sentence author as narrator Carver tells us that this dinner is an "extravagance." Carver could have had the narrator explain that it was also a birthday celebration. Instead, Carver lets that information come out in dialog, and crucially, it comes out after we've had a chance to see them interact for a spell. Notice how your sense of this dinner changes once you know it is her birthday? Doesn't that shift your opinion of Wayne's annoyances? Notice also what happens next. Caroline questions the champagne choice (apparently Lancer's is an upgrade), and, Wayne, perceiving the dig, admits to being a "lowbrow" and then he gets his own dig in: "Not like that group you've been keeping company with lately." And here we instantly recognize the surfacing of one of the couple's recurring arguments. Wayne pushes the hot button. How do we know? Because Caroline responds like this:

"Oh, shut up!" she said. "Can't you talk about something else?" She looked up at him then and he looked away. He moved his feet under the table.

As I've said before regarding Carver, when you are this good at showing you don't need to be a maximalist. That exchange is the writing equivalent of a picture being worth a thousand words. What's Wayne doing that Carver doesn't tell us? He's ruining another dinner—her birthday dinner this time—by bringing their current fight with them. But you saw that, right? Didn't need me to tell you about it either.

In the fourth section they try to make nice but the subtext—the issue between them that simmers beneath the surface—can't be kept down:

   "We ought to do this more often," he said.
   She nodded.
   "It's good to get out now and then. I'll make more of an effort, if you want me to."
   She reached for celery. "That's up to you."
   "That's not true! It's not me who's . . . who's . . ."
   "Who's what?" she said.
   "I don't care what you do," he said, dropping his eyes.
   "Is that true?"
   "I don' know why I said that," he said.

Now we know that she wants something he doesn't. And that the issue is gnawing so much at Wayne that he can't forget about even during her birthday dinner.

The fifth section is another set piece that has Wayne causing a stink about a missing spoon, but the real point is to reveal the mismatch between Wayne's (the "lowbrow") and Caroline's desires. And sensing it, Aldo offers the tour of the wine cellar and private dining rooms.

With the sixth section the gloves come off. First Wayne projects his anger onto the waiter. And then, in a brilliant application of using the exposition as ammunition dictum, Carver gives us this:

   When they had started the main course, Wayne said, "Well, what do you think? Is there a chance for us or not?" he looked down and arranged the napkin on his lap.
   "Maybe so," she said. "There's always a chance."
   "Don't give me that kind of crap," he said. "Answer me straight for a change."
   "Don't snap at me," She said.
   "I'm asking you," he said. "Give me a straight answer," he said.
   She said, "You want something signed in blood?"
   He said, "That wouldn't be such a bad idea."
   She said, "You listen to me! I've given you the best years of my life. The best years of my life!"
   "The best years of your life?" he said.
   "I'm thirty-six years old," she said. "Thirty-seven tonight. Tonight, right now, at this minute, I just can't say what I'm going to do. I'll just have to see," she said.
   "I don't care what you do," he said.
   "Is that true?" she said.
   He threw down his fork and tossed his napkin on the table.

So, now we've been shown what is really bugging them! The following section has more of Wayne's anger projected onto the waiter and the result is no dessert for Caroline's birthday dinner! (What a cad, no?) Wayne ends the exchange with the waiter by quashing another of Caroline's birthday perks: "And I don't want any guided tour of this place."

The story's final section begins with Caroline adding to Wayne's measly one dollar tip. Then Aldo lays it on thick by kissing Caroline's wrist (preceded by a click of the heels, of course) and giving her a rose. Wayne's only comeback is to say, of the Aldo/Lana Turner connection: "I don't think he ever knew her." Maybe it won't be Aldo, but we know that any man who isn't a "lowbrow" and who showers attention on Caroline is in with a chance. Notice also in this final section that Aldo says to Wayne, "A very lovely lady." This is a call back to the story's second paragraph where Aldo also looks at Wayne and says, "A lovely lady." This comment of Aldo's becomes a frame of sorts as Carver is clearly using the circular return to highlight this flaw in Wayne's character: To an insecure man, this type of compliment is perceived as a threat and the jealousy monster is unleashed.

When I first started reading Carver's stories—and, yes, I'm old enough to have read them when he was still alive—I was blown away by such stories as "Neighbors," "Are These Actual Miles?" "Vitamins," "Why Don't You Dance?" "Popular Mechanics," "Chef's House," and "Where I'm Calling From." As the philosophers say: a priori; those are great stories by any criteria. "Signals" on the hand was, and is not now, a story that excites me much as a reader. It isn't until you subject a story such as "Signals" to a close reading that you realize just how accomplished an artist Carver was. As a writer, "Signals" impresses me with the ease at which Carver has shown the rotten core of the relationship between Wayne and Caroline. To accomplish such a nuanced portrait of a relationship and its interactions without resorting to any character interiority or authorial reporting is so much harder than Carver makes it look in this story. Although we may ask for more as readers—what happens next? how did they feel about what was happening between them? etc.—further study of Carver's showing techniques in this story will definitely pay dividends to writers.

The other final thoughts I have about this story concern supposed autobiographical elements in Carver's fiction. Reading Maryann's book and finding Aldo (although she was 24 at the time not 37 like Caroline) puts the whole autobiographical debate from Sam Halpert's Raymond Carver: An Oral Biography in a new context. But even if you suppose that Wayne and Caroline stand for Ray and Maryann, the points made by Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, and other writers in Halpert's book about the artistic re-imagining of events still prevails. And supposing for the sake of argument that Wayne is Ray, look at what Ray did to himself with that characterization. The lesson is this: If you are going to put yourself into a story, don't make it a hero's portrait, write your shadow—that's where the drama, the art, the reason to write resides.

Not In Carver's Pasture

In Conversations with Raymond Carver, Carver says he left some stories out of his Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories because they were stories "which I just don't like and would never write again." (238) Among those stories left out is the subject of my last five posts: "Sixty Acres." But then he also left out "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?" which was included in the Best American Short Stories 1967. I suppose other writers have excluded prize winning stories from their collections, but I bet not too many. "Sixty Acres" was included in The Best Little Magazine Fiction, 1970. So, the two stories of Carver's that first received acclaim as the best of their respective years, were both stories he deemed not worthy of being included in his selected stories collection. Isn't that most interesting?

I don't have any grand theories about why "Sixty Acres" was excluded. As Meyer noted, it was the only story with an American Indian as the focal point character, so perhaps Carver thought the story wasn't representative. Or maybe Runyon's insight is correct and there are interrelationships between the stories and because both the stories that precede and follow "Sixty Acres" in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?—"Nobody Said Anything" and "What's In Alaska?"—are included in the selected stories collection Carver felt the issues most important to him had been represented. More likely, however, is that the story is too tricked up for the late Carver. He may have written it to make a point. And as the critical analyses have shown, he was successful in doing so. Iceberg or no, such blatant symbolism and manipulation of the text to produce an interpretation is atypical of Carver's work, and certainly atypical of his story writing intentions.

On the other hand, one of Carver's agendas with Where I'm Calling From was to counter the minimalism label he'd been affixed with, so I'm surprised he left out such a clear counter-example. Which just indicates how distasteful the story had become to him. Perhaps he regretted the blatant stacking of the deck in the first section, or the blatant mise en scene, or the blatant unspeaking, watchful mother—all of which are classic literary techniques, but the kind of techniques Carver typically avoided. In "Sixty Acres" Carver did use them, and while it may not be a story he ulitmatly felt was a keeper, it does demonstrate that he knew how to use such techniques, and that the bulk of his work consciously eschewed them, which refutes those critics who stated that Carver was an idiot savant who merely got lucky with his minimal style.

Carver's "Sixty Acres," like Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily," are good teaching stories because they work symbolically. It is useful for beginning writers to study such blatant use of craft, if only to learn how to ratchet it back. The other thing I like about "Sixty Acres" as a teaching story is that it also includes some of Carver's classic withholding techniques. By studying where he is blatant and where he is oblique, one can learn how to modulate one's attack.

Whatever Carver's reasons for disliking "Sixty Acres," that in no way invalidates the story. Just because it no longer fit his vision, or is not the kind of story he'd write again, doesn't mean it still isn't an excellent story.

Sixty Acres of Criticism

As I previously mentioned I would, in this post I take a look at what some of the critics have said about Raymond Carver's story "Sixty Acres" from his first collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? The four books I'm using as source material are all excellent examinations of Carver's stories, and if you are interested in delving deeper into Carver's themes and techniques all of these books will repay your investment and provide a richer understanding and appreciation of Carver's work. But these books are hard to come by and expensive, may not even be available in the bigger university libraries, so I'm going to quote from them more at length than I would otherwise so that you get the flavor of each critics' writing and not just the key points. You can also find a more general review of these books and others about Carver over on my Books on Carver page.

Saltzman, Arthur M. Understanding Raymond Carver. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988. (37-40)

Saltzman's reading of "Sixty Acres," as one might expect given the goals of the Understanding Contemporary American Literature Series as an introductory text, sticks close to the story's surface. But he also pushes his reading, providing his take on the iceberg beneath the surface:

Lee Waite's distress on "Sixty Acres" unfolds against the backdrop of racial dispossession. Waite feels as much burdened as justified by his Indian heritage and the reservation territory it guarantees him. He wishes he did not have to respond to the call about trespassing duck hunters on his land because it threatens to expose the breakdown of his authority.

I think this pushes too far because it's not clear that the breakdown of his authority is an issue. The prior occurrences—three or four that winter, and certainly more in the preceding years—means everyone knows he hasn't been enforcing his property rights. Waite is certainly presented by Carver as being annoyed by others—his sons, Joseph Eagle, his mother—expecting him to act against the trespassers, but there's no breakdown to expose; it's already known. And the real issue for Waite is that the sixty acres he owns is not close to his house, thus making it difficult for him to use and protect. Here's his rationale when discussing the lease option with his wife:

I was thinking maybe I'll lease out the land down there to the hunting clubs. No good to us down there like that. Is it? Our house was down there or it was our land right out here in front would be something different, right?

Saltzman's discussion of the ending, though on the right track, is vague:

The meagerness of his victories—the ouster of the trespassers and the plot to make thousand dollars from leasing the land—only invalidates his imagined prospects

As I noted in my own analysis, Waite does perceive his victories as hollow, but in no way do they invalidate his "imagined prospects." For one thing, we don't know what the thousand dollars would do for him. Saltzman would have done better to link Waite's response at the end to the loss of his heritage. With respect to that loss, Waite's victories are meager indeed.

Runyon, Randolph Paul. Reading Raymond Carver. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992. (28-29)

Runyon's analysis of "Sixty Acres" also reflects the agenda of his book: to explore "the interstices between the stories." So he compares "Sixty Acres" to the story which precedes it in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?—"Nobody Said Anything"— and that which follows it—"What's in Alaska?" The first salient feature Runyon takes up is the interchange between Waite and his sons, contrasting how in "Nobody said Anything" it is the son returning to disappoint the father, and in "Sixty Acres" it is the father on the verge of disappointing his sons:

He [Waite] knows his sons will be disappointed in the leniency he shows towards the boys [trespassers]. They had seen him take his double-barreled shotgun and asked him if he wasn't going to load it . . . When he returns home, having done nothing more than get the poachers to promise they will not do it again, he seems to anticipate the complaint his sons will likely make that he should have done more.

Runyon also picks up on the mother's silence, saying "His mother's silence may signal rage for her son's having betrayed his ancestors," and further noting that because of that "Lee Waite thus feels even more guilty about what he is thinking about doing." Runyon then segues into his reading of "What's in Alaska?" by noting that it "likewise concerns a man willing to abandon his claim to some empty land."

Bethea, Arthur F. Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction and Poetry of Raymond Carver. New York: Routledge, 2001. (38-39, 71-74)

Bethea's reading of "Sixty Acres" demonstrates both the brilliance and ludicrousness that the publish or perish industry frequently produces. He is in top form here:

"Sixty Acres" ends with the trivial indeterminacy of whether Lee Waite will rent his land to hunters. Symbolized so effectively by the connotations of stasis in the implicit pun on his name, wait, by the long time spent away from the hunting grounds of his youth, and by his unused salmon fishing spear, Waite's crucial loss of nerve is perfectly clear. Emotionally, he has lost the land; renting it is merely a coda.

The last point about Waite's emotional detachment is right on and Bethea builds on this concept, expands it to include "loss of identity" issues by drawing on details from the story:

Underscoring Waite's loss of emotional and spiritual vitality, images of constriction and decay abound. His "small house" provides "no place to go" . . . A "beat [sic] sack" covers the "opening" where the "one window glass had been knocked out years before," while "old yokes" and "a row of rusted hand tools" crowd the walls. Outside, the air is "still," the "low ceiling of heavy clouds pressing down on everything." A gate is "shut"—"a habit" Waite "had gotten into"—even though he no longer keeps horses. Only 32, Waite evinces decay: he is a "thin man with a thin face" with "loose skin around his neck."

With this excellent bit of textual analysis Bethea draws attention to the mise en scene carver creates in the story's first section, which shows Carver stacking the deck in a different way; by showing us a man who is already mired in the lassitude of defeat. Bethea also makes a strong connection between Waite's abdication of his heritage and his current sense of failure:

In his youth, he was close to the land, trapping "part of the creek for Muskrat and set[ting] night-lines for German brown," but Waite has not hunted or fished there for "four or five years," Carver concretizes Waite's loss of spirit: "Behind the stove the wood was black and peeling, and overhead he could see . . . the brown mesh of a gill net wrapped around the prongs of a salmon spear" . . . As the imagery of enclosure and decay suggests, Waite has stopped using the spear, a symbol of the heritage of the hunter drawing sustenance from nature . . . Now involuntarily connected to the land only through, ironically enough, constructs of the white man—a treaty and a deed and the paper on which they were written—Waite has, in a practical and spiritual sense, lost the land and with it something vital to his eviscerated identity.

That's a great stretch of iceberg reading. And now for the ludicrous, where Bethea, with a theory already in hand, sets about seeking evidence in numerology:

As I argue at greater length in subsequent chapters . . . numbers in Carver occasionally allude to the Christian tradition . . . Carver indicates that Waite is 32 years old and that he sees three duck fall from the sky. Three is associable with the Trinity and with the death and resurrection of Christ, which, according to Christian dogma, occurs over a three-day period. Christ is said to have died when he was 33 years old so that people would have a chance for eternal redemption; 32, then, correlates with a precrucifixion period: that is, a time without metaphysical salvation. Given the textual proximity of 32 and 3 and Carver's use of these numbers with ironic Christian reference elsewhere, an intentional allusion in "Sixty Acres" seems likely.

Or not. It gets worse. Bethea sees God in Waite:

. . . with Waite's age, one year short of the age frequently associated with Christ, may subtly foreshadow his ironic function as a god substitute . . .

Now, if that was what Carver intended, why wouldn't he have given Waite's age as 33, make him the same age as Christ? Or would that make it too easy for critics to figure out? Yes, better make him 32, all the better to disguise one's intention. Writers, after all, work in mysterious ways.

Lainsbury, G. P. The Carver Chronotope: Inside the Life-World of Raymond Carver's Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2004. (57-60).

Lainsbury's analysis of "Sixty Acres" also is approached from the perspective of a theory. The Carver Chronotope is another dissertation converted to a monograph and the "Sixty Acres" analysis appears in "Chapter Three: Wilderness and the Natural in Hemingway and Carver: Degradation of the Idyll" and it certainly helps to also be familiar with Bahktin's theories. Lainsbury begins his analysis liberally quoting Saltzman and then, picking up on Saltzman's notion of authority breakdown, opens new ground:

This authority has less to do with European concepts about private ownership of land than with the claim to use the land based on an authentic, living relationship with it . . . Native concepts of property . . . are not based on the principle of one man owning a piece of land, but on the idea of people using an area, deriving their livelihoods from it, and it is this use through time, not necessarily constant settlement and inhabitation so much as an intermittent or periodic use, which constitutes their claim to aboriginal title. Lee realizes in his heart of hearts that his unwillingness to use this land constitutes an abrogation of his claim to this land, if not in a strictly legal sense at least in a moral one. The sense of malaise which infects Lee and his people has to do with both their physical and temporal alienation from the land.

Here, Lainsbury provides the underpinnings for Bethea's loss of identity thesis, and the sociological background for the situation Carver's story foregrounds. Lainsbury, like Bethea, also sees Waite's defeat portrayed in the first section's scenic description:

Lee fears that he has lost this claim to the land, and the lifelessness of his existence is captured in the description of his cabin, which strikes one as more of an internment cell for superfluous people than a place where humans live . . . the description gives one a sense that little gets done here, needed repairs are not carried out and tools for the job rust from lack of use. An air of demoralization hangs over the cabin.

Lainsbury also does an excellent job connecting these themes of un-use and alienation with Waite's feeling of failure and his decision to lease the land:

He feels that maybe he "should've given them more of a scare," that he "could've killed them." But these are just empty words and thoughts, after the fact. Instead of defending land to which he no longer feels connected, he now proposes to symbolically surrender it to those who will at least use it. . . . Lee's decision to use his land for profit, and thus to sanction the use of the land by others who have less of a claim to it than he, who instead of a birthright offer money as justification for it's use, affects him physically. He suffers the kind of disorientation which accompanies betrayal. He is turning his back on his past, on the fragments of a legacy which have been passed down to him through the many generations of his ancestors who lived on this land before him, in order to pursue a course of assimilation, or perhaps it would be fair to state that he finally accepts the inevitability of assimilation and decides to stop resisting it.

Which brings Saltzman's and Bethea's, as well as my iceberg analysis, all together. Lainsbury, finally, makes a great point about the silent mother, whom he calls:

. . . a living reminder of what was, a connection to the world where Lee's ancestors had a real living relationship to the wilderness, and she can be read as either a quiet rebuke to her son or as a symbol of the tenuousness of that connection, which becomes weaker with each passing day.

If nothing else, this review of four critical analyses of "Sixty Acres" reveals that Carver did a superb job of submerging plenty of iceberg beneath the story's surface. And why did Adam Meyer skip this one? Because it was "atypical" and "unique?" But look at the discussion he could have been part of. As the weight of my posts attests, I think "Sixty Acres" is more worthy of analysis than many other of Carver's stories that critics have spent so much time on.

Next up I'll ponder why Carver excluded this excellent story when he assembled his selected stories in Where I'm Calling From.

Sixty Acres of Icebergs

In the previous post about Carver's "Sixty Acres" I mentioned the icebergs in the story. For those who might not be familiar with the concept, here's Hemingway's iceberg theory from Death in the Afternoon:

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.  The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.   The writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.

And now Carver, from Conversations with Raymond Carver:

Going back to Hemingway, Hemingway is an author whose work I admire greatly. I still go back and read his work with pleasure. You're probably familiar with his comment comparing a literary work to an iceberg: nine-tenths of the iceberg is under water. But as long as the writer knows what he's leaving out, that's okay. (17)
 
This goes back to Hemingway of course . . . I left out unnecessary movements. I was interested in having stories work invisibly. They would work without the author obtruding. (126)
 
Insofar as stories are concerned, you have to presuppose some kind of knowledge on the part of the readers, that they're going to fill in some of the gaps. (228)

My favorite iceberg in the story is Lee Waite's mother. I call her an iceberg because her presence in the story, the force she exerts, goes beyond the words on the page. On her first mention, Carver chooses a loaded word that shapes how we view her: [Waite] "glanced covertly at his mother." Covertly. He tries to look at her without her knowing it. That's the part of the iceberg we can see. The part we can't is everything that is packed into Lee Waite glancing covertly at his mother. What has transpired to make him do that? Carver withholds that information, but he wants readers to pick up on that tension. What happens next is that Waite gets caught looking: "She squinted her eyes at him and nodded." The squint, the nod, those are the tips of the iceberg, what they mean in the context of Waite's covert glance is what is submerged, left open for interpretation. It is a meaningful exchange between the characters that Carver wants readers to note, to fill in the gap that is the tension between "covertly" and "squinted." Carver then shows us a bit more of the iceberg—but remember, the more you see, the more is submerged—by introducing the communication difficulties:

. . . he didn't know any more what her little signs and signals, her silences, were supposed to mean.
   "Why don't you say something?" he asked, shaking his head. "How do I know what you mean, mama, if you don't say?" Waite looked at her for a minute and watched her tug at the ends of her braids, waited for her to say something. Then he grunted and crossed by in front of her, took his hat off a nail, and went out.

That grunt is loaded, too, isn't it? Carver doesn't tell us what Waite thought just then, but the grunt, the crossing in front of her, allows us to fill the gap ourselves.

The mother next appears in the story's final section: "His mother was still sitting beside the stove, a blanket over her legs now and her tiny eyes open, watching him." Again, notice how Carver chooses the loaded word. She doesn't look at him, she's watching him. That's an iceberg word. And again, Carver links the exchange with the failure of speech:

   "Were you afraid too, Mama?"
   The old woman did not answer. Her fingers fiddled around the sides of the blanket, tucking and pulling, covering against draft.

Waite and his wife talk, Waite wonders aloud if he was too easy on the trespassers and glances over at his mother, "But there was no sign from her, only the black eyes staring at him." Yep, staring. Carver loads up another word. Are you beginning to form an interpretation? Think Carver doesn't know what he's doing here? Then how about this:

   "I should've given them more of a scare, I guess." He looked at Nina. "My land," he added. "I could've killed them."
   "Kill who?" his mother said.

She speaks! And such choice words. What gaps do you fill here? Did she, like Waite's boys, want him to shoot some trespassers? Some white hunters trespassing on his Indian land. Think about the submerged part of that iceberg. Or was she afraid that he'd be killed, too, like his brothers, her other sons? She says nothing else, and now Carver has Waite join her in the failure to communicate: "He leaned over the stove, wanting to say something else. But he didn't know what." Apparently the iceberg is also the elephant in the room no one wants to discuss.

Now for the salmon spear.

As he moved across the little room, the old woman crooked her head and laid her cheek on the the chairback, eyes narrowed and following him. He reached up, worked the spear and the mass of netting off the splintery shelf, and turned around behind her chair. He looked at the tiny dark head, at the brown woolen shawl shaped smooth over the hunched shoulders. He turned the spear in his hands and began to unwrap the netting.

Once again, Carver loads up with her "eyes narrowed and following him," but now, with the salmon spear—the cultural artifact— and the context of discussing whether to lease the land, the submerged part of the iceberg, the judgement Mama's eyes have been making, is easily interpreted. Just in case there is any doubt, this is how she leaves the stage:

   "Don't you understand?" he said. He gripped the table edge. "It is a lease!"
   "What will Mama say?" Nina asked. "Will it be all right?"
   They both looked over at the old woman. But her eyes were closed and she seemed to be sleeping.

Mama, and Joseph Eagle at the beginning of the story, are the elders sitting in judgment of Lee Waite because he hasn't protected and upheld his cultural heritage. Isn't that the submerged part of the iceberg? The gap of meaning Carver expects us to fill? It's never expressed directly, yet is omnipresent in the story. Isn't that also the failure Lee Waite feels but claims not to understand after the confrontation with the trespassers? Yet, as he stands with the salmon spear and net in hand, looking at his mother, the gap we fill is that the denial is behind him. He knows.

Snatching Defeat From Victory

Raymond Carver's "Sixty Acres" is the story of how Lee Waite, tired of having to deal with trespassing hunters, decides to lease out his sixty acres of prime hunting land to hunting clubs. Although Carver embeds many nuances into the narrative, the story focuses, as many Carver stories do, on the moment of failure, on the moment when the character is down yet still has to take another kick to the ribs. ("Are These Actual Miles?" is, I think, the most terrifying example of such a Carver story.) "Sixty Acres," however, demonstrates how Carver's perspectivism turns a victory into defeat, because one could view Lee Waite's actions a success: he puts the trespassers off his land; he decides to earn income from the land he no longer uses. But Lee Waite doesn't view these actions as a success. From his perspective—this lens through which Carver shows him—he has failed: by not taking more decisive action against the trespassers; by giving up and leasing out his land. Examining how Carver snatches defeat from victory is a useful way for writers to learn some of Carver's darker art.

Structurally, "Sixty Acres" can be simplified like so: Preparing for the confrontation, the confrontation, and the aftermath of the confrontation. Classic three-act formula: Setup, conflict, resolution. Within that framework, however, Carver uses a more complicated five section movement.

The first section begins with Lee Waite standing on the porch deciding what to do and ends with him sitting in his truck hoping the trespassers will have left already. In between, Carver stacks the deck. As we'll see in a subsequent post when I look at what some literary critics say about the story, there are many ways to interpret this first section, but, from a writer's perspective, it is quite clear what Carver is doing: He is setting the reader up to expect the worst.

Trespassers "shooting" on Waite's land. And not for the first time. He's reluctant to do something about them but "he wasn't afraid; it wasn't that, he told himself. He just didn't want trouble." He grabs his double-barreled shotgun and a handful of shells. His young boys wanting "to know if this time he was going to shoot somebody." The view into the house of the mother, and of his wife feeding the baby with another on the way. And then the dog comes up to be petted. "You better stay here this time" he says to the dog.

Starting to get the picture?

But Carver's not done. Waite gets into his truck "wishing again he didn't have to go" and thinks about the dream he had, but can't remember, that had made him feel uneasy since he had woken up that morning. And as he waits for the grader to pass he remembers what his neighbor:

. . . had told him a few days ago, about a fight Charley had had last Sunday with some kid who came over his fence in the afternoon and shot into a pond of ducks, right down by the barn. The ducks came in there every afternoon, Charley said. They trusted him, he said, as if that mattered. He'd run down from the barn where he was milking, waving his arms and shouting, and the kid had pointed the gun at him. If I could've just got the gun away from him, Charley had said, staring hard at Waite with his one good eye and nodding slowly. Waite hitched a little in his seat. He did not want any trouble like that. He hoped whoever it was would be gone when he got there, like the other times.

And thus, with the deck fully stacked, Carver ends the first section. We've seen the family Waite leaves behind. We see how reluctant he is. The trouble he doesn't want is the trouble he's going to get. Why else the setup?

But Carver is still not done with the setup. Section two continues building the tension and raising the stakes. Waite thinks the trespassers might have gone but then he hears "a grouping of far-off shots" so he drives down to where he finds their car:

He sat in the truck and waited, squeaking his foot back and forth on the brake and hearing them shoot every now and then. After a few minutes he couldn't sit any longer and got out . . .

As he stalls, they shoot and the expectation of the confrontation builds. And now comes the passage I've previously quoted where Waite remembers his brothers' deaths and how he came to inherit the land. Again Carver ends the section with the expectation that the worst is to come; Waite joining his brothers by dying via knife or gun.

The third section, a scant three paragraphs and 150 words, is the call to action. First the reminder of his family:

He was thirty-two, and Benny and little Jack were growing up. And there was the baby.

Stacking the deck again. Then he watches the ducks overhead and sees the "duck fall before he hears the shots." Now he has to act:

. . . he took out his gun, careful not to slam the door. He moved into the trees. It was almost dark.

Dark indeed. And the confrontation is no further away than the first sentence of the fourth section as "they came thrashing through the brush, two of them." But despite the buildup, all the expectations of the worst, they are just boys and Waite has the drop on them:

"Stand there. Put your guns right there on the ground." He edged out of the trees and faced them, raised and lowered his gun barrels. "Take off them coats now and empty them out."

The boys do and here, less than a third of the way into the confrontation, Waite has his victory over the trespassers. But victory is not what Carver has in mind and he immediately flips things around and starts Waite down the path towards defeat. First the strong challenge:

"Whose land do you think this is?" Waite said. "What do you mean, shooting ducks on my land!"

And then he starts to wither:

"What do you think I'm going to do?" Waite said. His voice sounded strange to him, light, insubstantial . . . "What do you think I'm going to do with you?" he said. "What would you do if you caught boys trespassing on your land?"
   "If they said they was sorry and it was the first time. I'd let them go," the boy answered.
   "I would too, sir, if they said they was sorry," the other boy said.
   "You would? You really think that's what you'd do?" Waite knew he was stalling for time.

And there we have the classic passive Carver man refusing to take strong action. Stalling, that's where Carver snatches defeat from victory, and then: "He knew he would let them go in a minute. There wasn't much else he could do. He was putting them off the land; that was what mattered." With this bit of interiority Carver combines Waite's feeling of weakness with the fact that he's succeeded. Waite immediately reacts—nice touch by Carver, showing Waite acting out after the feeling—by challenging the boys for their names. And now Carver makes us think Waite is about to break out of the passivity:

"You're lying!" he said, shocking himself. "Why you lying to me? You come onto my land and shoot my ducks and then you lie like hell to me!" He laid the gun over the car door to steady the barrels.

But Carver won't let Waite have the victory:

When he stood still, waiting, his knees unaccountably began to shake.
   "Go ahead and go. Go on!"
   He stepped back as they came up to the car. "I'll back up the road. You back up along with me."
   "Yes, sir," the one boy said as he slid in behind the wheel. "But what if I can't get this thing started now? The battery might be dead, you know. It wasn't very strong to begin with."
   "I don't know," Waite said. He looked around. "I guess I'd have to push you out."

Which is a humiliating capitulation for a shotgun wielding landowner. Might be hard for eastern city-folk to appreciate, but the setting of this story is the rural west, where "trespassers will be shot" signs are everywhere. Carver doesn't show the sign, but even Waite's boys are expecting, no, hoping that he'll shoot some trespassers (we'll come back to that point in section five).

They drive off, and then, with another bit of interiority, Carver gives Waite his defeat:

   He had put them off the land. That was all that mattered. Yet he could not understand why he felt something crucial had happened, a failure.
   But nothing had happened.

And thus ends section four, which might well have ended the story at a place where many of Carver's stories do end, but this time Carver pushes the resolution further. He has to deliver the kick to Waite's ribs, don't you know.

In section five, Waite returns home. He's greeted first by his dog, and then by his wife. The circular return to his family. And to echo the beginning, where Waite (interiority again) thought he wasn't afraid, now he hears his wife say:

   "I was afraid."
   "Afraid?" He tried to make it sound as if this surprised him. "Were you afraid too, Mama?"

Here Carver uses another bit of interiority to reveal Waite's intention, which lets us know how to read this exchange and what is to follow. I suppose some would argue that even this is minimal, as if we need to have full interior monologues to know what is in the character's mind. Suffice to say that Carver doesn't always give this much information, preferring instead to leave room for interpretation. And that strategy is coming right up as Carver heads for the story's end with a classic bit of withholding [emphasis mine]:

He tried to think about it, but already it seemed as if it had happened, whatever it was, long ago.

Ah, yes, follow the bouncing it. This is an incredibly calculated passage—deliberate withholding by the author. To what end? To make us fill in the blanks? To give Waite his defeat, his failure? But immediately following this withholding act, Carver delivers on another of his classic techniques as Waite acknowledges his defeat:

"I should've given them more of a scare, I guess." He looked at Nina. "My land," he added. "I could've killed them."
   "Kill who?" his mother said.
   "Them kids down on the Cowiche Road land. What Joseph Eagle called about."
   From where he stood he could see his mother's fingers working in her lap, tracing the raised design in the blanket. He leaned over the stove, wanting her to say something else. But he didn't know what.

As with so many of Carver's stories "what we have here, is a failure to communicate" (you should be hearing the famous line from Cool Hand Luke now). The important thing to note about the appearance of these two techniques—withholding interiority and communication breakdown—so late in this story is that they are done for effect rather than as a general strategy (the general strategy approach was saved for the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love). The use of these techniques in "Sixty Acres" provides an excellent window into Carver's conscious use of technique. If you want to really understand Carver's minimalist techniques, don't look at the minimalist stories. Look instead at how those techniques are used in "Sixty Acres." Now you see them, now you don't. And it's no accident. The business with Waite fondling the spear is a perfect example. Carver could have shared Waite's thoughts, but he doesn't and I think it creates one of the most exquisite moments in the story. It's one of the icebergs (more on the icebergs in a follow-up post) in the story where the reader is left to contribute the interpretation. Part of what is so great about this particular iceberg is the way it provides the subtext for the discussion about leasing the land.

The decision to lease the land brings the story to its conclusion. Another victory—sure seems as if the Waite's could use a thousand dollars—is presented as a defeat. Perspectivism at play again. From Waite's perspective (and Carver's too, we presume), by giving up the use of his land he is giving up his inheritance and—the iceberg—his heritage. Once again he has capitulated, snatched defeat from victory.

With the next post I'll take up the icebergs in the story. And then it's on to what the literary critics have to say about "Sixty Acres."

The Usual Themes

As I mentioned in the previous post, Adam Meyer skipped "Sixty Acres" in his analysis of Carver's stories because it was "unique" and "atypical." Actually, "Sixty Acres"—which was included in The Best Little Magazine Fiction 1970— is not at all atypical with regard to its themes as it features two classic Carver themes: passive male character and communication breakdown. Meyer's rationale for uniqueness is that the focal character is Native American, and, while that is unique, it is no more unique that Carver using Chekhov in "Errand" or Miss Dent from Cheever's "The Five-Forty-Eight" in his "The Train." Regardless whether Lee Waite is American Indian, he's still a typical passive Carver character. Meyer's suggestion that the story is atypical and that the story refutes "critics' charges that Carver is a one-trick pony" is possibly aimed at the minimalism label. But "atypical" here is also tenuous given Meyer's "hourglass" thesis: that Carver's work started out fuller, went minimal (under the influence of Gordon Lish), and then expanded again. Such fullness, when contrasted with Carver's minimalist work, refers primarily to two stylistic aspects: descriptive texture and character interiority. So, when compared to the bulk of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver's most minimal collection, passages such as the following from "Sixty Acres" would be considered atypical. First, descriptive texture:

Down the road, the grader was scrapping toward him, the blade shrieking fiercely every time the metal hit the frozen gravel.

Now, interiority:

Lee Waite was sure she had something wrong with her because sometimes she went two days without saying something, just sitting in the other room by the window and staring off up the valley. It made him shiver when she did that, and he didn't know any more what her little signs and signals, her silences, were supposed to mean.

Admittedly these are just brief examples, and they certainly don't turn him into a maximalist, but they are typical of this story's style and if you thought Carver was only a minimalist, passages such as these should give you pause. But for Meyer, these passages actually provide more support to his hourglass theory than do the thrice revised "Distance" and "So Much Water So Close To Home." My point is that "Sixty Acres" better makes that case because it is another early non-minimal story that didn't suffer the hourglass revision treatment. It disappeared, ducked under the minimalist-critics radar, or was ignored because it was "atypical" and "unique," or maybe because it was too powerful as a counter-example; in any event, by excluding "Sixty Acres" Meyer skipped a key piece of evidence in support of his thesis. "Sixty Acres" is only "atypical" and "unique" if you are trying to prove—which Meyer wasn't—a minimalist thesis; and then all you could do is dismiss it as the exception which proves the rule.

Not all critics have skipped over "Sixty Acres," and in a subsequent post I'll discuss the analysis of the story provided by Saltzman in Understanding Raymond Carver, Bethea in Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction and Poetry of Raymond Carver, Runyon in Reading Raymond Carver, and Lainsbury in The Carver Chronotope: Inside the Life-world of Raymond Carver's Fiction. Next up, though, I'll give my take on the story.

Who Is It?

Let's start with a quiz. Who wrote this?

He remembered when he was little, wanting to grow up. He used to come down here often then and trap this part of the creek for muskrat and set night-lines for German brown. Waite looked around, moved his feet inside his shoes. All that was a long time ago. Growing up, he had heard his father say he intended this land for the three boys. But both brothers had been killed. Lee Waite was the one it came down to, all of it.
   He remembered: deaths. Jimmy first. He remembered waking to the tremendous pounding on the door—dark, the smell of wood pitch from the stove, an automobile outside with the lights on and the motor running, and a crackling voice coming from a speaker inside. His father throws open the door, and the enormous figure of a man in a cowboy hat and wearing a gun—the deputy sheriff—fills the doorway. Waite? Your boy Jimmy been stabbed at a dance in Wapato. Everyone had gone away in the truck and Lee was left by himself. He had crouched, alone the rest of the night, in front of the wood stove, watching the shadows jump across the wall. Later, when he was twelve, another one came, a different sheriff, and only said they'd better come along.

Unless you know the story it's from, I'd wager your guess will be dead wrong. The story? "Sixty Acres." The collection it's from was nominated for a National Book Award in 1976. The writer? Raymond Carver. In this early story he's as expansive as the Cathedral-era Carver. What prompts me to take up this story is that I finally managed to score a copy of Adam Meyer's Raymond Carver, the long out-of-print Twayne's United States Author Series edition—I'm still trying to find a copy of the other out-of-print Twayne series book, Raymond Carver: A Study of the Short Fiction by Ewing Campbell, so if you have one and want to sell it . . .—and have been working my way through it. In his discussion of Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? Meyer skips over "Sixty Acres" with these comments:

The next tale, "Sixty Acres," is in some ways the most atypical one in the volume, focusing as it does on a Native American narrator who is torn between his loyalty to his heritage and his desire to live a peaceful life. Although the story is effectively presented—and although it does refute some critics' charges that Carver is a one-trick pony—I have chosen to skip over it in the interest of space and because it is such a unique item in Carver's oeuvre.

Ahem, skip . . . because it is . . . unique?? Wouldn't that be a reason to discuss it? Meyer was not alone in skipping this story. Carver himself left it out of Where I'm Calling From, the collection that he said contained the stories he felt were worth keeping. I choose, however, not to skip the story. I'll spread my commentary out over a few postings and will take up the story, other critics response, and then, finally, take a look at what might have prompted Carver himself to skip the story.

Why, Carver?

I received a request for my take on Raymond Carver's story "Why Honey?" It's not one of my favorites, but I haven't written on Carver for awhile, so I'll give it a go. "Why Honey?" from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? and also included in Where I'm Calling from is unique among Carver's stories because it is an epistolary, and I think any discussion of the story might begin by asking what Carver achieved by choosing this form. (I wasn't able to turn up any commentary from the man himself on this story, so we are on our own.) My dog-eared copy of A Handbook to Literature, in the section on the Epistolary Novel (think Samuel Richardson's Pamela or Clarissa) says that using letters to drive the narrative has "the merit of giving the author an opportunity to present the feelings and reactions of characters without the intrusion of the author into the action." Some further advantages mentioned by the Handbook are that it creates a sense of immediacy and verisimilitude because "the author is merely serving as 'editor' for the correspondence of the 'actual' persons." The primary disadvantage cited is the flip-side of one of the advantages: the author can't comment on the action or the characters. "Why Honey?" is not an exchange of letters between characters, is in fact, a single letter, so our focus can narrow itself to the intent of the letter and our sense of the letter writer. That's what Carver has given us. I've seen in the criticism (Saltzman, Bethea, Lainsbury, and Runyon) many attempts to take the analysis of this story beyond the text, but I think the focus should stay on the letter and its effects.

Notice that Carver does not frame the letter, the text begins "Dear Sir:" and ends with "Yours truly," but that the letter itself contains a frame. The beginning frame:

I was so surprised to receive your letter asking about my son, how did you know I was here. I moved here years ago right after it started to happen. No one knows who I am here but I'm afraid all the same. Who I am afraid of is him. When I look in the paper I shake my head and wonder. I read what they write about him and I ask myself is that man really my son, is he really doing these things.

And the ending frame:

   I am old. I am his mother. I should be the proudest mother in all the land but I am only afraid.
   Thank you for writing. I wanted someone to know. I am very ashamed.
   I also wanted to write to ask how you got my name and knew where to write. I have been praying no one knew. But you did. Why did you? Please tell me why.

What this frame tells us is that after years of hiding out, someone has written her a letter inquiring about her son, whom she is both afraid and ashamed of, even though she should be proud of him. She wants someone to know why she is afraid and ashamed, and she wants to know how the person who wrote her a letter (the contents of that letter which Carver is clever to keep from us) found her. Working on the assumption that the beginning and endings of the letter state what the letter writer is most concerned about, we can read through the letter and fairly state that the letter writer believes that her son, now a Governor, is a liar and much worse (as indicated by the cat and the firecrackers, the shotgun, knife, and bloody shirt, his suspicious attitude, and possible threat "kneel down is what I say"). Her fear and shame, when coupled with the pressure of concealing the "truth" she believes she knows about her son, has, upon the prompting of the letter she has received, caused her to unload what she has kept inside all these years. Guilt wins out and she comes clean. The intent of the letter then appears twofold. Catharsis for her as she exposes her son for what she believes he really is.

But of course the letter reveals as much, if not more, about her as it does her son, which brings us to the effect of the letter. Do we believe the letter writer? Does Carver want us to? Or has he seeded the letter with doubts about her reliability as a narrator? How many times do you think, when the mother is recounting the dialogue with her son, she uses the term "honey?" How about 10. And this is the boy who "broke my heart that night" by screaming at her "get out of here, I'm sick of you spying." That's one set of clues. Another is the way her fears are expressed:

    . . . He ran for governor and was elected and was famous now. That's when I began to worry.
   I built up all these fears, I became afraid, I stopped writing him of course and then I hoped he would think I was dead. I moved here. I had them give me an unlisted number. And then I had to change my name. If you are a powerful man and want to find somebody, you can find them, it wouldn't be that hard.
   I should be so proud but I am afraid. Last week I saw a car on the street with a man inside I know was watching me, I came straight back and locked the door. A few days ago the phone rang and rang, I was lying down. I picked up the receiver but there was nothing there.

Starts to sound a bit paranoid doesn't it? Notice the phrase "I built up all these fears," that strikes me as a deliberate word choice by Carver and a clue. Also, at the end of the long passage I quote there's the phrase "but there was nothing there." Again that strikes me as a deliberate clue as to how Carver wants us to read her. And, as other critics have pointed out (Lainsbury, Bethea) there is the matter of the letter writer's grammar, syntax, comma splices and non-sequitors. Carver most certainly could have written the letter in clean prose, but he didn't, so what is he trying to imply? Did he want to bring into question the writer's sanity? Combine the rambling narrative with the hints of paranoia and you have the beginnings of a case study on your hands.

Which leaves us where? A letter intending to assuage guilt, but written by an unreliable narrator of questionable sanity. And no context of an outside perspective to balance the letter. Why, Carver? What did you hope to acheive with this form? Or was it merely an experiment in form? Given the single point of view and the unreliability of the source, I don't think a clear answer can be given using only the text as guide. I'll leave the psycho-analytical reading of the story to Runyon.

As writers we have the choice of clarity or ambiguity; it always makes for interesting reading when the writer chooses ambiguity, chooses to foreground the epistemological hole at the center of our existence, our inability to truly know another. That and the inability of words to express what we think we know and what we feel, were core themes in Carver's work, and the letter in "Why Honey?" certainly reflects those concerns.

No Tricks

One striking aspect of Raymond Carver's "Popular Mechanics" is the direct way it conveys its message. It doesn't, for example, cloak beneath metaphor the damage that a dissolving marriage does to children. A metaphorical, or as some would argue, artistic way to present the action of this story is to have the parents argue over the baby's picture, pulling on it until it tears in half, thus symbolizing the effect the parent's dissolving marriage would have on the child. Instead, Carver dispenses with metaphor and symbol and just deals with the issue directly by having the parents each grab an arm. This jettisoning of metaphor is central to Carver's "no tricks" approach to his art. It's an approach that put him at odds with many literary critics. Why? Because to academia art by definition uses indirection—art is making one thing stand for or represent a meaning which is not explicitly part of the object. So, to that way of thinking, choosing not to make metaphor is choosing not to make art. That's an argument with which Carver took direct issue. Over and over again in his stories he strived to achieve the same emotional affects as metaphorical art without resorting to metaphorical tricks. Carver's work, exhibit A being "Popular Mechanics," makes the case that whether something is art or not should be judged by its affects—the emotional response it produces in readers—rather than by its techniques. The risk of this approach, of course, is that the writing can slip into sentimentality, or else uses the images, as they do on television news broadcasts, merely for shock value. Carver doesn't cross those lines in "Popular Mechanics."

The Art of Revision

Raymond Carver is well known for his love of revision. Because he also revised his published stories and then published the revisions we have a rare look into his revision process. So I'll continue my discussion of "Popular Mechanics" by looking at the changes Carver made between the first version of the story titled "Mine" and the final version of the story titled "Little Things" (which was identical to the middle version titled "Popular Mechanics").
 
Although there are quite a few minor word changes and deletions throughout the story, as well as paragraphing changes, I want to focus on the beginning paragraph and the ending paragraphs because that is where the most substantive changes occur, changes which strengthen the story in a way that is most instructive to writers. First let's look at the two versions of the opening paragraph. Here's "Mine:"

During the day the sun had come out and the snow melted into dirty water. Streaks of water ran down from the little, shoulder-high window that faced the back yard. Cars slushed by on the street outside. It was getting dark, outside and inside.
 
[(92) Furious Seasons. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1977.]

And now "Little Things:"

Early that day the weather turned and the snow was melting into dirty water. Streaks of it ran down from the little shoulder-high window that faced the backyard. Cars slushed by on the street outside, where it was getting dark. But it was getting dark on the inside too.
 
[(152) Where I'm Calling From. New York: Vintage, 1989.]

The change made to the first sentence is a perfect example of why revision is so important. You might say there's nothing to revise in the version from "Mine"—that is until you see the version from "Little Things." The key improvement is in changing "the sun came out" to "the weather turned." The original sentence focuses on the "sun" and the revision generalizes to "weather," which is more encompassing and thus allows the reader to make more associations. It also evokes the human element by suggesting expressions such as "under the weather" or "heavy weather" that are used to describe health and emotional turmoil. "Turned" is also a key word change. Aside from being more active than "had come out," it is also suggestive of the turn in the couple's relationship. The first sentence now suggests that the story will also be about a turning. That the turn is ongoing is further reinforced by changing "the snow melted into" to "the snow was melting." A subtle change—and usually it’s better to remove to be verbs on revision—but one that works here because it suggests a process ongoing rather than one completed.
 
The revisions to the last two sentences of the first paragraph are also subtle, but make a leap in clarity and, more importantly, attitude. Adding the "where it was getting dark" clause is essential to shift the tone so that it becomes both a hook and a (rare in Carver) value judgment about the action to come. "It was getting dark, outside and inside" is unbelievably lame in comparison to "but it was getting dark on the inside too," which is one of the most chilling lines in all of Carver.
 
Moving to the ending, here are the final paragraphs of "Mine:"

She felt her fingers being forced open and the baby going from her. No, she said, just as her hands came loose. She would have it, this baby whose chubby face gazed up at them from the picture on the table. She grabbed for the baby's other arm. She caught the baby around the wrist and leaned back.
   He would not give. He felt the baby going out of his hands and he pulled back hard. He pulled back very hard.
   In this manner they decided the issue.
 
[(93) Furious Seasons. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1977.]

And here's the ending of "Little Things:"

She felt her fingers being forced open. She felt the baby going from her.
   No! she screamed just as her hands came loose.
   She would have it, this baby. She grabbed for the baby's other arm. She caught the baby around the wrist and leaned back.
   But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and pulled back very hard.
   In this manner, the issue was decided.
 
[(153-154) Where I'm Calling From. New York: Vintage, 1989.]

The first thing to note about these passages is that several of the sentences are shorter, creating a more staccato pace. Which is reinforced by the additional shorter paragraphs. These changes accelerate the pace into the close and also isolate the action, which makes it easier to visualize. All these changes increase the sense of menace in the story.
 
Among the other changes, the deletion of "whose chubby face gazed up at them from the picture on the table" is a huge improvement. Suddenly shifting the focus from the baby to the picture of the baby was a major mistake in the original—the tussle is not over the picture, but the baby; the shift causes a loss of momentum. Also notice how the (author's) sarcastic tone now stands out because it is isolated: "she would have it, this baby." Contrarily, I don't think changing "he would not give" to "but he would not let go" is an improvement. While not letting go is more precise and graphic about what he is doing, I think the statement that he's not giving up has more emotional charge. It's also a companion statement to "she would have it." Leaving that linkage in would have been stronger.
 
Changing "he felt the baby going out" to "he felt the baby slipping out" is an example of the kind of revision you should always be looking for: Making verbs more precise.
 
The last sentence, as with the first sentence, is a case where shifting to a passive construction actually strengthens the meaning. Again this is a subtle shift, but changing "they decided the issue" to "the issue was decided" reinforces the lack of control the parents have because in fact they aren't deciding anything. Neither of them give in and the mechanics of the baby's bones relative to the strength of the adults pulling is presumably what decides the issue. The passive construction also has a stronger authorial tone, just as the line from the first paragraph—"But it was getting dark on the inside too."—does. These two sentences serve as bookends and establish, with their tone, an allegorical frame. That's a case of Carver, through revision, putting the language stylistically in line with his original intent. This type of allegory with an implicit moral lesson needs some attitude from the author and Carver adds more of it in the revision. Why does it need authorial attitude? Remember the source material: This story updates a passage from the Old Testament, the wisdom of King Solomon no less. So in this case it's not enough to show, thus the hint of telling. Such authorial presence is rare in Carver, but in this case it's an example where he put his rules aside and chose instead to fit form to function. That's the art of revision.

Title Your Way to Meaning

Raymond Carver's shortest story, the one featuring parents yanking on a baby's arm as if it were a wishbone, has been published under three different titles although it is most commonly anthologized, discussed, and known by it's second title "Popular Mechanics." The story was first published with the title of "Mine" and collected in Furious Seasons, Carver's second story collection, which has long been out of print and difficult, but not impossible, to find (I recently acquired a like-new and unread first edition for about a hundred bucks). The story re-appeared with slight—but not insignificant edits (a subject I'll take up in the next post)—as "Popular Mechanics" in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. When Carver put together what turned out to be his final story collection—Where I'm Calling From—he again included the story, without edits this time, except for a title change: "Little Things." Although Carver changed the titles of several of his stories after they were published, I find it fascinating that this particular story has three titles. If this piece were an essay in literary criticism I'd argue under this thesis: Carver considered the story to be core to his oeuvre and each time he published it he gave it a title which reflected his concerns for that particular collection. Thus "Mine" reflects the battleground of marriage/relationships that is so prevalent in Furious Seasons as well as Will You Please be Quiet, Please?, which came out the year before. "Popular Mechanics" reflects the stripped down menace that pervades What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. And "Little Things" is a metafictional rejoinder to the critics who've labeled him a minimalist, which reflects a major concern of Carver's when he published Where I'm Calling From: He wanted to present his work in a broader perspective, illustrate that the minimalism—a label which he rejected—was just a technique used in some stories, not the defining characteristic of his work.
 
In this piece, however, my focus is less on the literary criticism aspects of the titles, but on titles as an element of short story craft, how they help shape the meanings of stories. From this angle, "Mine" is the title that most reflects what the dramatic action of the story is about. It also reflects a common way that stories find their titles: What Henry James referred to as the donne, the given, the controlling idea that makes the writer write the story. For instance, "Mine" reflects the dynamics between the parents. In an adult version of the familiar battle—"It's mine." "No, it's mine." "Mine." "Mine." And so on—the parents selfishly argue over the baby as if it were a toy and they children. In this case the title focuses on the notion, dramatized in the story, that possession is more important than anything—except, of course, making sure that the other person doesn't get it. So "Mine" is an example of a title that makes its statement by analogy as you read the story: The way the parents fight over the baby reminds of how children fight over their possessions. On the negative side, the title is so explicit in interpreting the action that it undercuts the story's irony: The parents are acting like that which they fight over— babies. They reveal themselves to be children still, despite being adults and parents. That's one of the points the dramatic action of the story makes. And the title "Mine" reinforces that interpretation, even leads one to make that interpretation.
 
The title "Popular Mechanics" on the other hand puts a different interpretation in mind from the start. First, the title is play on the magazine of the same name. Popular Mechanics emphasized science, as well as technology-based home improvement projects, many of which were do-it-yourself. Several interpretations are suggested: The couple treat the dissolution of their marriage as a do-it-yourself home improvement project, and that such dissolutions are "popular"; in the sense that they are common, the norm; and the baby is treated as a toy/mechanical device rather than as a living breathing child. The title also gets the imagination working on the physics—the mechanics—of two adults pulling with all their might on the baby's arms. And to return to the theme of menace so prominent in the lean stories of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, the title has a chilling tone to it once you realize what the dramatic action of the story depicts.
 
Carver's final title, and thus his last word on the subject, was "Little Things." I mentioned that one way to read this title is as a metafictional rejoiner to the critics of minimalism: With this story and its new title Carver is saying bunk to those who claim that only a maximalist approach can yield meaning or cause an emotional response in readers. The littlest things, even the minimalist things—in the hands of a master—can have great power. The key is to focus on the right little things.
 
Another interpretation, one focused on the action of the story itself, is that the littlest things—in this case the wife taking the baby's picture—can precipitate the worst events, witness the baby being literally pulled apart.
 
Textually, the word "little" is used twice in the story: "Streaks of it [melting snow] ran down the little shoulder-high window that faced the backyard." And, "She stood in the doorway of the little kitchen, holding the baby." These uses of "little" lend to reading them as the diminished frames (window, doorway) of their diminished marriage and life. This is a less intuitive reading, but keep in mind that readers frequently notice, even search out, the words in the story that match the title, and then latch onto those passages as a clue to meaning.
 
An even darker interpretation of the "Little Things" title is that it is a commentary on the parents themselves, as in, "Look at them, such little things." Which is a commentary on the size of their character for putting such selfish needs (winning possession) ahead of the baby's welfare.
 
My point in discussing these three titles is to illustrate how a story that is essentially unchanged from collection to collection can lend itself to completely a different range of interpretations because of it's title. (And this is without even touching upon the most commonly discussed interpretation in the critical studies of Carver: That this story is an allegory updating the Old Testament passage where King Solomon threatens to divide a baby in two with a sword as a means to settle a dispute between two women claiming to be the baby's mother.) The title you choose has consequences for how the reader interprets the story, so give it as much attention as any other aspect of your craft.

How About That Subtext?

Subtext is the primary container for meaning in Raymond Carver's "How About This?," which is important to keep in mind because on the surface, not only does the story not resolve, it becomes even more open-ended in the final paragraphs. Reams have been written on subtext, but I'll offer a simple definition as I examine its use in "How About This?" Subtext is the meaning not explicitly expressed that the author expects the reader to infer. In reference to "How About This?," as with many of Carver's stories, an even stronger statement can be made about the use of subtext: Carver explicitly withholds meaning at the surface level to force readers to make their own interpretations.
 
In the previous article I pointed out how the intimate touches and looks exchanged between Harry and Emily at the end of the story's first section were part of the subtext. Let's follow one of those threads all the way through and see how it works. Presented in the order they appear in the story, but with the rest of the story (the context) removed, here’s the subtext Carver means for us to interpret:

Emily removed her dark glasses and leaned forward, staring.
   She put on her glasses again, only to take them off a moment later.
   [she]…was silent now as he looked out at the cleared fields, at the isolated stands of fir trees, at the occasional weathered houses.
   He turned carefully…waiting for the sign of the house. Emily sat next to him, edgy…also waiting for the first glimpse.
   After the first unsettling glance, he kept his eyes on the road.
   She was looking at him, not looking at the house at all.
   She kept looking at him, serious now. He felt lately that she was always looking at him.
   She kept watching him.
   He avoided looking at her. She was shrewd and might have read something from his eyes.
   "Yes, you did. I distinctly remember," he said, still looking at her.
   He tried to cover his disappointment.
   …he turn[ed] away to examine something in the corner.
   "I wish you'd just be quiet," she said. She turned and went outside.
   They walked toward the barn, stopping to inspect the withered apple trees.
   He moved closer to her then and thought they might embrace. He wanted to. But she did not move; only looked at him steadily, and so he touched her on the nose with his forefinger and said, "I'll see you in a little while."
   He watched her go. He looked at his watch, turned, and walked slowly down the pasture toward the woods…he rubbed the bridge of his nose under his dark glasses, looked back at the house and barn, and continued on, slowly…He looked back again, but now he could not see the house or barn.
   As he rounded a corner of the house, he saw her completing a cartwheel. She landed with a light thump, slightly crouched, and then she saw him.
   She let herself fall against her shoulder and rolled onto her back, covering her eyes from the sun with an arm as if to uncover her breasts.
   The match went out and he stood there holding the empty matchbook and cigaret, staring at the vast expanse of trees at the end of the bright meadow. .

With the subtext isolated in this way it can be read as a story within the story. Notice the picture it creates of Harry's and Emily’s relationship, the focus on making and avoiding eye contact, on observing and not being observed. Notice also that Carver never makes any judgment on what this behavior means—that interpretation is left up to the reader. The subtext is there, though, like the steady beat of a bass drum, providing rhythm to the story, making itself felt even when we are not aware of its pulse. Although a few of these lines undoubtedly stood out as you read the story, for example, "She was looking at him, not looking at the house at all," and "He avoided looking at her. She was shrewd and might have read something from his eyes," I bet you were surprised, as I was, by the extent of this subtext within the story. The passages I've isolated amount to 5% of the story's words; with that much weight assigned to the subtext a fair case can be made that it is not coincidental.
 
Authorial intent is a slippery slope, so I'll leave Carver aside for the moment and make instead some general comments about working with subtext in a story. Subtext is hard to add in after the fact, but here's two ways to approach it. First, as you read through a draft of your story, look for your unconscious commentary. As with Carver's story, body language is a great place to start. Is there a pattern to the gestures you attribute to your characters? Do they have or give looks that surprise you now that you are studying them? If so, your unconscious has provided a subtext that you can build upon. All you have to do is thread similar passages into the rest of the story.
 
The other approach is subtraction. Sticking with the body language example, read through a draft of your story and mark all the passages where you have described what a gesture or a look means. Now go back and remove all of that explicit commentary. Let the look or the touch stand on its own. What that cutting does is move the passage from the surface (the explicit meaning) to the subtext (the meaning to be interpreted).
 
Why subtext? Because art is interpretive. Just as informational and on-the-nose dialog is boring, narrative commentary that provides the story's explicit meaning is also boring. A big part of the power of Carver's stories is that surface meaning is elusive. He almost never tells you what the story is about. Not only that, he rarely makes the interpretation easy. His stories have a tone, a feel that creates an affect, an emotional response from readers. But it is difficult to say—and for critics to agree on—what exactly the stories are about. For example, is "How About This?" a story about a city man seeking a simpler life who discovers that the rustic life is more primitive than he can handle? Or is it a story about a woman who returns to the house she grew up in only to discover that her memories—and the dreams she had for herself then—are now too much to bear? Or is it a story about a relationship disintegrating under mistrust and close scrutiny? Is it about the characters' self-discovery? Or is it about the self-discovery within their relationship? Of course it's about all those things and more. By leaving the ending open and by layering in several subtexts, Carver has avoided over-determining the story's meaning. "How About This?" is not a story you read once, say you have it figured out, and then don't read again. It's a story that stays open and interesting—even becomes more interesting—with repeated readings. Much of that interest originates in the endless interpretative possibilities afforded by Carver's use of subtext.

Building upon a Hook

Raymond Carver's "How About This?" is not all opening hook signifying nothing. The remaining paragraphs of the first section continue propelling the story forward as Harry drives further away from civilization. Before the section break Carver uses three techniques worth pointing out. First, he uses the journey itself to tug the reader deeper into the story. In the opening paragraph, a long journey was summarized. Now, as we approach the destination, the descriptions become more detailed and the anticipation increases with each turn of the road, which links reader and character; we get there when Harry does. Secondly, Carver carefully plants images and descriptions that increase the sense of foreboding: sweat on his forehead, dust trails, burned out houses, a ruptured appendix, dark mountains, and branches slapping the windshield. The third technique is the introduction of another character—Emily—who not only is sharing the journey with Harry, but seems to know the area, is in fact giving him directions. Notice how your interest heightens with her appearance—she signals that there’s more to this story than a man on a foreboding journey. It also ups the ante on the hopelessness and outrage described in the story’s first paragraph because now we know another person is involved.
 
As the section nears its end, Carver also introduces an intimacy between Harry and Emily that will be important throughout the rest of the story:

…she leaned forward slightly and touched her hand to his leg. "Now," she said. He slowed almost to a stop, drove through a tiny puddle of a stream that came out of the high grass on his left, then into a mass of dogwood that fingered and scraped the length of the car as the little road climbed. "There it is," she said, moving her hand from his leg.
   After the first unsettling glance, he kept his eyes on the road. He looked at the house again after he had brought the car to a stop near the front door. Then he licked his lips, turned to her, and tried to smile.
   "Well, we're here," he said.
   She was looking at him, not looking at the house at all.

These touches and looks as the section ends foreshadows the interaction between Emily and Harry in the rest of the story. It's in this charged subtext that much of the story's meaning—however elusive it is—resides. In the next posting I'll take a look at how Carver creates the subtext and how that becomes the focus for driving the story forward to its open-ended conclusion.

Characters In a Bind

Raymond Carver's story "How About This?" from his collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? is a great example of a technique he frequently uses to introduce and maintain tension throughout a story: Start by putting your character in a bind. Here's the first paragraph:

All the optimism that had colored his flight from the city was gone now, had vanished the evening of the first day, as they drove north through the dark stands of redwood. Now, the rolling pasture land, the cows, the isolated farmhouses of western Washington seemed to hold out nothing for him, nothing he really wanted. He had expected something different. He drove on and on with a rising sense of hopelessness and outrage.

Another great opening hook, isn't it? In the story's first paragraph Carver does what most beginning—and even many experienced—writers are afraid to do: He starts off by telling us the character's situation and his emotional state. When I say writers are afraid to start a story this way, what I mean is that the natural tendency is to withhold such information because the writer worries that if readers know in the first paragraph what the story is about they might put the story down. That's a case of the writer not trusting the subject matter and instead trying to lure the reader into the story using other devices—description, dialogue, another "set up" scene—before unleashing the kind of paragraph Carver starts with.
 
A related reason for not starting so directly is because the writer wants to surprise the reader—make them think the story is going in one direction and then having them discover it's going elsewhere. So, for example, "How About This?" might have begun with a scene showing Harry all excited and optimistic about leaving San Francisco. Only to change direction by showing him losing his enthusiasm when he reaches the pastures in western Washington. In fact, I'd be willing to bet most of us have received such advice from creative writing teachers and workshop participants, something along the lines of: show him happy so we can see the change when he loses hope.
 
Is that the best way? Maybe.
 
On the other hand, read that first paragraph again. Do you really need to see how optimistic he was before? Do you need to see that optimism slipping away? Do you need to know what or how he expected things to be different? And are you really going to put this story down because you know he is heading into a situation that makes him feel hopeless and full of outrage?
 
I thought not.
 
Why? Because you know enough but not too much. You know his expectations have clashed with reality. And you know how that makes him feel. But what you don't know is what happens next. You don't know how—or even if—the character gets out of the bind he's in. Carver creates tension in the opening not by withholding information, or by surprising you with a change of direction after the start, but by telling you exactly what is going on.
 
As you read the rest of the story notice how Carver maintains and increases that tension, a topic I'll take up in the next post.

Father? Who’s a Father?

"The Father" is one of Raymond Carver’s short-shorts from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, his first collection of stories. It’s a two-pager, and even at that length it is filled with the repetitive dialog frequently seen in Carver’s early stories. But notice how, without ever expressing it, Carver makes you think that what’s in question is whether the father in the story is the baby’s father, even though it’s said the baby looks like “Daddy.” After saying that, Carver does an interesting thing—he puts the father’s identity in question:

"But who does Daddy look like?" Phyllis asked.
   “Who does Daddy look like?” Alice repeated, and then they all at once looked through the kitchen where the father was sitting at the table with his back to them.
    “Why, nobody!” Phyllis said and began to cry a little.
    “Hush,” the grandmother said and looked away and then back at the baby.
   “Daddy doesn’t look like anybody!” Alice said.
   “But he has to look like somebody,” Phyllis said…

So, in addition to maybe not being the father, the father is a nobody, he isn’t anybody, and he is not a somebody. Further, as the story ends, he is “without expression.” In these two scant pages Carver has put both the baby’s (he might be a bastard child) and the father’s (he’s nothing of note, and may not even be a father) identity into question. Perhaps more remarkable, from the economy of prose standpoint, is that Carver achieves that feat all in the story’s second page. The first page is mostly banal baby observing until the comment is made that the baby looks like the mother.
 
Although “The Father” is not one of Carver’s better stories, the action on the second page does pay study because of how he generates so much meaning with an economy of words. Not only that, but, as I’ve indicated above, comparing the banal first page with the charged second page gives you the opportunity to see just how he does it.

Self-voyeurism

One of the more fascinating aspects in Raymond Carver’s “Neighbors” is what I will term Bill’s self-voyeurism. One could argue that all of Bill’s looks in the mirror represent his narcissism. What makes the mirror gazing so fascinating is the context in which it occurs. Snooping around inside his neighbors apartment is a form of voyeurism. Yet Bill, in the midst of voyeuristic behavior, spends a considerable amount of time spying on himself. When he’s wearing first Jim’s and then Harriet’s clothes and “observing himself in the mirror” his voyeurism takes the form of trying to see self as other. Although this is a quite fruitful line of critical inquiry, from the craft perspective this move ties the Miller’s—and especially Bill’s—behavior to the sentiment expressed in the story’s beginning. The Miller’s are not just snoops and voyeurs, they are trying on the Stones’ life because “they alone among their circle had been passed by somehow.” When Bill observes himself in the mirror in his neighbors’ clothes he’s hoping to see himself in the “fuller and brighter life” that he imagines the Stones to live.
 
Granted, that’s an interpretation that I’m making. Carver does not intimate what Bill thinks as he observes himself in the mirror. But what the Miller’s feel they have missed out on is clearly stated in the story’s opening paragraph. What Carver does so well in “Neighbors” is put that feeling in play throughout the remainder of the story without ever mentioning it again. The primary way Carver does that is by showing Bill trying to see himself as the Stones.
 
I’ll close on a digression. Trying on the clothes—particularly given the thematic context set up in the beginning of the story—is a form of Bill putting himself in the Stones’ shoes. But of course the shoes literally don’t fit: “He considered her shoes, but understood they would not fit.” That’s a bit of Carver’s sly wit; and a nod to another story in Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, “Put Yourself in My Shoes.”

Oh, Behave

Here’s a tour of the forbidden behavior in Raymond Carver’s "Neighbors." The behavior starts when, during Bill’s first visit to the Stones’ apartment, he pockets Harriet’s bottle of pills. Then he searches for, and finds, the booze. For the brand conscious, Chivas Regal was the top of the line scotch at the time the story was written—so Carver is making a point by naming it: Bill is seeking out the Stones’ good stuff. Not only does Bill drink the scotch, he drinks it straight from the bottle.
   More pillaging occurs on Bill’s second visit to the Stones’ apartment. After rummaging through the cupboards he raids the refrigerator, taking bites of cheddar cheese and an apple. Then he’s into the bedroom where he takes a pack of cigarettes from a bedside drawer.
   His next bit of forbidden behavior is to have Arlene “call in for him” presumably to take a “sick day” from work. In and of itself not many would consider that forbidden behavior. But he’s doing it so he can hang out in the Stones’ apartment without being interrupted by his wife. It’s on this third visit to the apartment that Bill’s behavior escalates. First he locks the cat in the bathroom so he has a free reign. Then he’s stripping down and trying on Jim’s clothes and drinking more of the Stones’ booze. Next is a bit of cross-dressing as he puts on Harriet’s clothes.
   But Bill’s not the only one who’s being naughty in the Stones’ apartment. Although Carver doesn’t let us follow Arlene around the way he did with Bill, we know from the bedspread lint on her sweater that she’s been lying on the bed. As with Bill’s hand moving “under his belt,” the phrase “the color was high in her cheeks” could be read as a sign of masturbation (Bethea is an example of one critic who makes that interpretation), particularly after she reveals that she’s gone through the drawers and “found some pictures.”
 
From one perspective you could say it’s a no-brainer that Carver should have Bill and Arlene violate the Stones’ apartment, after all, where’s the story in feeding the cat and watering the plants? Still, it’s precisely such choices that distinguish stories such as “Neighbors” from those that remain unpublished. Much of the interest this story generates comes from the question “What will Bill do next?” And that interest is maintained into the ending because the story closes on a bit of coitus interruptus because we have to assume that next up was Bill and Arlene having sex in the Stones’ apartment.
 
The strategy here is quite simple. Place the characters in a mundane situation and then make them repeatedly do what they shouldn’t—make them engage in forbidden behavior. And as Carver shows, its not just forbidden acts that characters can engage in—they can also have forbidden thoughts. Both Bill and Arlene entertain the idea that maybe the Stones won’t return. More than entertain the notion, they express it as a wish.
 
One final point about Carver’s strategy in the story. He uses the banal opening scene to focalize the forbidden acts. This is somewhat risky because the banality at the beginning might cause some readers to grab the eject handle. Carver does it the right way. The first paragraph has enough hook in it, and the banal scene is short, less than a page, and then Carver puts Bill right into the apartment. If you get the pacing right, a little bit of mundane will heighten the intensity of the forbidden acts to follow. You’ll see a similar approach play out in many of Carver’s stories: mundane followed by menace.

Being a Boon for Critics

“Neighbors,” the second story in Raymond Carver’s first collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? has inspired many energetic critical commentaries. Here’s a few examples.
 
Arthur F. Bethea in his Technique and Sensibility in the Fiction and Poetry of Raymond Carver writes:

Through ridicule, Carver suggests both the unhealthiness of sexual relations between the Millers and the inadequacy of seeking fulfillment solely outside oneself. The conclusion shows no trace of contempt, however, as Carver avoids the belittling endings of “They’re Not Your Husband” and, as we shall see, “Jerry and Molly and Sam,” focusing instead on just how desperately empty the Millers feel. Longing for more than their meager allotment, Arlene and Bill hope that their neighbors will not return, pathetically intimating that the Stones’ apartment is a talisman that can magically transform their lives; it is of course, just and apartment. [71]

Kirk Nesset in his The Stories of Raymond Carver: A Critical Study writes:

…"Neighbors," a tale of marriage in the process of diminishing. As with so many of Carver’s fictive marriages, the story deals less with love or passion than with its conspicuous absence, and with the symptoms of love's withdrawal. It is the tale of Bill and Arlene Miller, a “happy couple” who, now that the original intensity of their marriage had dwindled, experience sexual titillation in the home of their neighbors, which they have agreed to look after…[12]

And then there’s Randolph Paul Runyon’s amazing miss-reading in his Reading Raymond Carver:

The conclusion of "Neighbors" sounds, however, a cautionary note. The Millers become so fascinated with the apartment across the hall that they forget the reason they were allowed there in the first place, neglecting to feed the cat or to water the plants. What is worse, they lock themselves out of their own apartment, having forgotten to bring along the key.[14]

Actually Arlene left the key to the Stones’ apartment inside the Stones’ apartment and now the Millers can’t get back into that apartment. Which, as Bethea points out, is not really that big a deal because the apartment manager could let them back in. But that bit of reality intrusion is of no matter to the feeling of the ending that Carver produces. The oh shit feeling that the thrill is gone. It’s easy to sense how the Millers must feel now that they are forced to live in their own lives again. It is precisely this type of emblematic ending, of which Carver was so adept, that gets the critics tongues wagging.
 
A lot of great stories never generate critical analysis, so what’s in Carver’s craft that has inspired so much critical commentary? For one thing, “Neighbors” is the very definition of that writing dictum to show rather than tell. Although the narrative in the beginning of the story indicates that the Millers feel that life has passed them by, nowhere in the story is there any mention of their sexual dissatisfaction. Yet at the end of the story, when the Millers are locked out of the Stones’ apartment, it is clear from the preceding scenes that being in the Stones’ apartment had filled a sexual lack. We know it even though Carver never tells it. All of the meaning is suggested by the Millers actions. The moral here? Let the critics do the explaining. If you do it, they won’t need to.
 
After a bit of vacation I’ll return to look more closely at the aspects of craft that Carver employs in “Neighbors.” As a tease, read through the story with an eye towards forbidden behavior. That’s where I’ll pick up next week.

Narrative Efficiency

The scene in “Night School” where the narrator talks to his father illustrates a couple of frequent techniques used by Raymond Carver to achieve narrative efficiency. First is the character doubling. The narrator is out of work, living with his parents, and going nowhere in life. The father, sitting around in his pajamas while his wife works, also doesn’t have a job. “He used to work in the woods, and then he got hurt. He’d had a settlement but most of that was gone now.” The narrator, too, has been hurt (not that he ever describes it that way—this doubling shows us), and is out of money:

I asked him for a loan of two hundred dollars when my wife left me, but he refused. He had tears in his eyes when he said no and said he hoped I wouldn’t hold it against him. I’d said it was all right, I wouldn’t hold it against him.

Here the repetition ties the two men together. Later, the narrator talks about walking out to the restaurant where his mother works so he can (apparently) mooch a turkey sandwich from her. Like the father, he’s dependent on the mother for sustenance.
 
While I’m on the topic of doubling, there are two other prominent examples of it in the story. The two women are doubles and the way they repeat each other’s words is a form of doubling. And the dream of the man staring into the window who “then begins to pry off the screen” is doubled by the women: “I could hear them shaking the outside door. I could hear footsteps on the sidewalk over my window.”
 
Back to the scene with the father. I addition to the meaning produced by the doubling, this scene functions as a correlative for his life, and thus contains the bulk of the story’s meaning. He joins his father on the couch, says, “I don’t need the car. I’m not going anywhere.” Which is what the whole story is trying to show.

School of Nada

Usually the Raymond Carver stories I discuss are ones that excite me, but sometimes it’s useful to look at those that clunk. “Night School" from Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? is one that’s always clunked for me. The beginning holds promise:

My marriage had just fallen apart. I couldn’t find a job. I had another girl. But she wasn’t in town.

Sounds like the lyrics to a blues song—he’s down on his luck and the forecast is more trouble up ahead. Then the story launches into the long middle section, and after reading through it a couple of more times I see that it’s the repetitive dialog I don’t like. Carver often uses repetition for effect. Here, though, it seems merely to be an attempt at verisimilitude. And that might be the problem with this section of the story: It is too slavishly trying to imitate a bar conversation. Why is that a problem? Because most bar conversations are only interesting if you’re drunk and in them. So here’s a story that could have benefited from the lean treatment given many of the stories in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.
 
The clunky dialog doesn’t completely obscure some great Carver touches: “I’d been nursing my beer along, and now I drank it off and thought they might buy me a round. They didn’t.” Forced to buy the beer himself, the narrator is then left with only 30 cents and it becomes amusing as he finagles his way down the bar and gets them to buy him beers.
 
Here’s another subtle Carver move:

I sipped my beer. Someone put a coin in the jukebox and a song that my wife liked began to play. I looked around. Two men near the front were at the shuffleboard. The door was open and it was dark outside.

Most writers would use such a moment for the character to ruminate on his kaput marriage. This character is not that self-reflective. Instead he’s looking over his shoulder—out into the dark. (Not so subtle when it’s described like that, is it?)
 
The story appears to be on a path towards the trouble forecasted in the beginning. The narrator has hooked up with two women who want to drop in on a teacher whom “they have something on.” But the narrator guzzles one of their beers and abandons them on his doorstep. Although this abandonment is a surprising release of the story's tension, and even seems to suit—and dramatize—the narrator’s downward inertia (“I’m not going anywhere” he tells his father), it doesn’t fulfill the trouble suggested by the beginning, nor does it deliver the seemingly promised scene of the teacher “dropping his cookies.” And that makes “Night School” a story about a character not only not going anywhere, but ducking out on life’s experiences. This is one reader who would prefer to have seen the narrator flame out at Patterson’s.

Don't Flatter Yourself

A few more thoughts on Raymond Carver’s “Are These Actual Miles?” and autobiographical elements in fiction. One way to shift autobiographical experiences into story mode is to resist the urge to make yourself the hero of the drama. For example, if “Are These Actual Miles?” is more autobiographical than a few shared experiences between Leo and Ray, if Leo is Carver, it’s not exactly a flattering self-portrait, is it? You have to be willing to tell the worst on yourself, and then exaggerate that into drama. So, if Leo isn’t Carver, but a fictional construct, the story task was to take a few details about a dark moment in Carver’s life and try to infuse those moments with more drama than real life had. How to do that? Compress. Take events that happened over months and compress them into a weekend, into a sleepless night. Bring the world crashing down all at once. Also, don’t make the story about just one thing—say, the selling of a car—throw in infidelity, disapproving neighbors, a wife telling it like it is (“you’re nothing,” “bankrupt”) and thoughts of chewing glass and suicide.

From Poem to Story

Raymond Carver was also an accomplished poet and when reading his poems it’s interesting to see some of the same themes and even the same wording show up in the stories. “Are These Actual Miles?” is one such story with a tie to a poem. Here’s “Bankruptcy”:

Twenty-eight, hairy belly hanging out
of my undershirt (exempt)
I lie on my side
on the couch (exempt)
and listen to the strange sound
of my wife’s pleasant voice (also exempt).
 
We are new arrivals
to these small pleasures.
Forgive me (I pray the Court)
that we have been improvident.
Today, my heart, like the front door,
stands open of the first time in months.

The bankruptcy comparison is obvious, but here’s the similar phraseology in “Are These Actual Miles?”:

Leo and Toni still had furniture. Leo and Toni had furniture and the kids had clothes. Those things were exempt. What else? Biccycles for the kids, but these he sent to his mother’s for safekeeping. The portable air-conditioner and the appliances, new washer and dryer, trucks came for those things weeks ago. What else did they have?

Both the poem and the story passage key on the sentiment of which possessions are exempt from creditors and the bankruptcy court. The speaker in the poem has made the shift from possessions to simpler pleasures. The story, however, explores the darker side of the experience as Leo is shown at the climactic moments of loss on his way to having nothing.

Adding Drama to Life

My previous blogs on Raymond Carver’s story “Are These Actual Miles?” continue to be the most frequently read in the entire weblog, so I thought I’d add to those postings with some background work on this story that I did in graduate school. One aspect of Carver’s fiction that has frequently been commented on by critics is how closely some of his stories track the details of his life. For example, Sam Halpert, in his book Raymond Carver: An Oral Biography persistently chases after the autobiographical elements in Carver’s fiction. Relevant to “Are These Actual Miles?” here are some quotes from Halpert’s interview with Carver’s first wife, Maryann. First on the question of autobiographical aspects in Carver’s fiction she says:

"People get into such generalities. Ray was a fiction writer. His work is not strictly autobiographical. Many incidents happened that were kernels of stories, but he had the dramatic sense to make them into a story that people would sit up and take notice. The fact is that all happy families are alike, as Tolstoy observed, but unhappy families are unhappy in a unique way. Ray fastened on what was unhappy and unique in a situation and was able to create a dramatic story rather than a bland tale with no tension. A lot of times, as I’ve said, he’d take a kernel of something that really happened and convert it into a fine story." [75]

Some background related to the story:

“When we were in Sacramento, we had two salaries. He had his job in the hospital, and I was office manager at Parents Magazine Cultural Institute. My immediate supervisor there was Werner Erhard, who later founded est…I had never made so much money in my life…then the cookie thing came up [Ray got fired from a job] and there was no money…The lights were turned off at our house at one time, and then we couldn’t pay the rent, I took the children and went to my mother’s in Paradise California, and Ray had to go live with his parents….At Parents I just rose in the ranks. There was opportunity to make money, dress well, use my intelligence, and I went for it. Before long I was wearing hundred-dollar dresses [this is in 1965] from Magnin’s, and I had a maroon Pontiac convertible. We started living the high-life, you know.” [69-70]

On the question of bankruptcy, which the Carver’s went through twice, she says:

“Well, we did get into debt in Sacramento. It was a debt we had been paying, and expected to continue making the payments. Ray got tired of that and suggested bankruptcy. We had a major disagreement about that. I was adamantly opposed to it, adamantly, adamantly, adamantly opposed to it.” [77]

And finally, her comments about the story itself:

“Or take the story ‘Are These Actual Miles?’ I actually went out and sold my Pontiac convertible. It was my car, and I sold it, but how I sold it was nobody’s business. Ray’s story wasn’t life. It was a story from an incident in our lives that captured his imagination, and Ray wrote it.” [76]

Regardless the percentage of strict autobiographical content in the story, picking up on Maryann’s point, dramatic tension is the key to this story, and Carver creates it by exerting pressure on Leo from beginning to end. First Leo has to face Toni’s teasing

”You look fine,” he says. “You look great. I’d buy a car from you anytime.”
   ”But you don’t have money,” she says, peering into the mirror. She pats her hair, frowns. “And your credit’s lousy. You’re nothing,” she says. “Teasing,” she says and looks at him in the mirror.

Then Leo has to endure his neighbor’s stare, which turns the pressure inward, reminding him of his other indiscretions. Carver then milks the wait, turning it into an excruciating all-night scotch drinking terror. It’s bad enough that Leo is left with his own imagination and feelings of self-loathing, but making it worse are the phone calls from Toni.
 
The fight on Toni’s return is perhaps the most expected part of the story, and one of the strokes of dramatic genius Carver employs is to not make that expected scene be the climax of the story’s arc. That climax comes in the following scene when the car salesman returns driving the convertible and all of Leo’s humiliations are dumped on him all at once as he stands there with his ripped shirt.

Putting Meat on Those Bones

“Fat” is one of those Raymond Carver stories that cries out for a literary critic’s interpretation because Carver’s narrator, despite the lack of summing up at the end, believes she’s told too much:

That’s a funny story, Rita says, but I can tell she doesn’t know what to make of it.
   I feel depressed. But I won’t go into it with her. I’ve already told her too much.
   She sits there waiting, her dainty fingers poking her hair.
   Waiting for what? I’d like to know.
   It is August.
   My life is going to change. I feel it.

The reader is in Rita’s situation, not quite sure what to make of the story and expecting to get a bit more enlightenment. What she—we—are waiting for is an answer to why the narrator is telling this story and what it means to her. Nothing doing, Carver says, he’s already told you plenty. (Critical aside: That Carver put this story first in his collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? should be considered as him serving notice. Yo, Reader, be prepared to work—I’m not spelling things out for you.)
 
Craftwize, Carver does use the tried and true technique of compare and contrast to seed the story with the biggest (fattest) clue to (or to one of) its meanings. Compare the fat man with the narrator’s husband, Rudy. One is polite, the other derogatory. And then there’s the matter of those fingers:

This fat man is the fattest person I have ever seen, though he is neat-appearing and well dressed enough. Everything about him is big. But it is the fingers I remember best. When I stop at the table near his to see to the old couple, I first notice the fingers. They look three times the size of a normal person’s fingers—long, thick, creamy fingers.

Well, you know what they say about a man’s fingers. The narrator never describes Rudy’s fingers, but when he—here, let Carver’s words do the work:

I get into bed and move clear over to the edge and lie there on my stomach. But right away, as soon as he turns off the light and gets into bed, Rudy begins. I turn on my back and relax some, though it is against my will. But here is the thing. When he gets on me, I suddenly feel I am fat. I feel I am terribly fat, so fat that Rudy is a tiny thing and hardly there at all.

So not only is Rudy derogatory, he forces sex on the narrator. And he’s a tiny man, doesn’t have those long, thick, creamy fingers the fat man has. I don’t suppose we need a literary critic to figure out what that means. Putting the fingers description at the beginning of the story and the forced sex at the end of the story is one way that Carver has pointed the way to meaning. Such strategic placement creates narrative weight.
 
Paradoxically, when the narrator says “I’ve already told her too much” that is not the refusal to make meaning it seems. What has just been revealed? That the narrator is on the edge of the bed as far from Rudy as she can get, and then has sex with him against her will. And this admission comes at the end of a story she’s telling about the fat man she served at work. She has revealed the emptiness in her marriage. She told more than she wanted to say about that. By having the narrator admit she’s said too much, Carver is pointing us back into the story, commanding us to go find the meaning he’s put there. He won’t sum things up because he doesn’t need to. If you were reading along expecting to be told what it means, well, think again. Don’t be like Rita, Carver is saying, she who sits there expecting to be given the answers. All you need to know has already been provided. So I’m arguing that that “I’ve already told her too much” line actually reinforces the story’s meaning rather than withholds it as some critics have supposed.

When What They Talk About Isn’t Love

Although a lot of Raymond Carver’s stories feature couples arguing, he’s also quite adept at submerged tension. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” is a perfect example. In this story the cracks in the relationship appear not only in moments of direct conflict, but in the nuanced dialog that often counterpoints the what-is-love discussion. Here’s where the first crack appears:

“Terri’s a romantic. Terri’s of the kick-me-so-I’ll-know-you-love-me school. Terri, hon, don’t look that way.” Mel reached across the table and touched Terri’s cheek with his fingers. He grinned at her.
   “Now he wants to make up,” Terri said.
   “Make up what?” Mel said. “What is there to make up? I know what I know. That’s all.”
   “How’d we get started on this subject, anyway?” Terri said. She raised her glass and drank from it. “Mel always has love on his mind,” she said.
   “Don’t you, honey?” She smiled, and I thought that was the last of it.
   “I Just wouldn’t call Ed’s behavior love. That’s all I’m saying, honey,” Mel said. “What about you guys?" Mel said to Laura and me. “Does that sound like love to you?”

Where “honey” in the last exchange nearly has the subtext of “asshole” and “bitch.” After a lot of back and forth banter as the story of Terri’s dead-ex is told—a story that makes clear the strain her and Mel’s relationship must have been under at the time—Carver does a quick contrast between the couples:

“You guys,” Terri said. “Stop that now. You’re making me sick. You’re still on the honeymoon, for God’s sake. You’re still gaga, for crying out loud. Just wait. How long have you been together now? How long has it been? A year? Longer than a year?”
   “Going on a year and a half,” Laura said, flushed and smiling.
   “Oh, now,” Terri said. “Wait awhile.”
   She held her drink and gazed at Laura.
   “I’m only kidding,” Terri said.

Like hell she is. The subtext of “wait awhile” is: Before you know it you’ll be picking each other apart in front of other people just the way Mel and I are. See how much tension is in Terri’s gaze? Don’t think tension needs action. Quite the opposite. Action releases tension.
 
Later, as Mel gets drunker, he starts ranting about what love is and what it isn’t. In the midst of this rant he says:

“There was a time when I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you explain that? What happened to that love? What happened to it, is what I’d like to know.”

Carver again sows more subtext. If it happened once, it could—maybe already is starting to—happen again. Carver lets Mel rant a bit more and then brings the conflict closer to the surface:

“Mel, for God’s sake,” Terri said. She reached out and took hold of his wrist. “Are you getting drunk? Honey? Are you drunk?”
   “Honey, I’m just talking,” Mel said. “All right? I don’t have to be drunk to say what I think. I mean, were all just talking right?” Mel said. He fixed his eyes on her.
   “Sweetie, I’m not criticizing,” Terri said.
   She picked up her glass.
   “I’m not on call today,” Mel said. “Let me remind you of that. I am not on call,” he said.

A hand on the wrist. A dirty look. A denial. A reminder to back off. Here we see what is surely a familiar pattern for Terri and Mel. But it escalates a moment later:

“Come on now,” Terri said. “Don’t talk like you’re drunk if you’re not drunk.”
   “Just shut up for once in your life,” Mel said very quietly. “Will you do me a favor and do that for a minute?”

Open warfare now, but Mel launches into his story and soon he and Terri kiss and make up and Mel continues telling his meandering story. The tension is again simmering under the surface until Terri corrects Mel when he uses the wrong word:

“Vassals,” Terri said.
   “What?” Mel said.
   “Vassals,” Terri said. “They were called vassals, not vessels.”
   “Vassals, vessels,” Mel said, “what the fuck’s the difference? You knew what I meant anyway.”

A moment later she gives him the needle on the same topic:

“Some other vessel,” Terri said.
   “That’s right,” Mel said. “Some vassal would come along and spear the bastard in the name of love. Or whatever the fuck it was they fought over in those days.”
   “Same things we fight over these days,” Terri said.

Which deftly makes both a universal and a particular statement. Mel, then, returns to his story about the old couple as he tries to prove his point about what real love is. The subtext of his story about the old couple is that none of them—Terri and Mel, or Laura and Nick—have that kind of love. In the midst of telling this part of the story, Mel says to Laura:

“Laura, if I didn’t have Terri and I didn’t love her so much, and if Nick wasn’t my best friend, I’d fall in love with you. I’d carry you off, honey,” he said.

With that many conditionals in his statement you just know he could make a play for her any time, is in fact, as much as putting the offer on the table. Mel then gets maudlin and wants to call his kids from his first marriage, but instead reveals his fantasy of killing his ex-wife with bees (she’s allergic).
 
So if you’re Terri, how are you feeling right about then? But we are at the end of the story and her final words—“Now what?”—carry the weight of all the accumulated subtext. Whatever they think love is, it seems likely, given the tension of Carver’s subtext, that Terri’s and Mel’s love has played out, even if they profess the opposite.

Master of Menace

By popular request, Raymond Carver’s “Popular Mechanics,” a story I’ve probably read a hundred times. Although the basic action of the story—a man and a woman fighting over a baby—is dramatic enough, Carver’s presentation makes it all the more menacing.
 
One way Carver achieves this sense of menace is with the man’s dialog. With one exception he makes only short statements. Here’s his lines of dialog isolated so you can see what I mean:

Bring that back.
I want the baby.
No, but I want the baby. I’ll get someone to come by for his things.
I want the baby.
Let go of him.
Let go of him.
I’m not hurting the baby.

After listing these lines I was surprised there weren’t more because it feels like he’s says more than that; his actions speak that loud. And notice the repetition. He says, “I want the baby” three times and “let go of him” twice. These short commands are part of the menace.
 
Another part of the menace is when he doesn’t speak. At the beginning of the story he’s packing his suitcase while she yells at him. He doesn’t respond. And at the end of the story, through most of the struggle with the screaming baby, he says nothing. So these silences amidst the action while the woman yells or the baby screams heightens the menace by showing his determined self-control and his desire to exert control over them.
 
Carver also uses descriptive language to propel the menace: “he moved toward her” “she turned and tried to hold the baby over in the corner behind the stove,” “but he came up,” “in the scuffle they knocked down a flower pot,” “he crowded her into a wall then, trying to break her grip,” “he pushed with all his weight,” and my favorite, “in the near-dark he worked on her fisted fingers.” These are all simple descriptions, but they powerfully show the escalating action. Nothing is obscured by extraneous details. The simple word pictures make this scene easy to visualize. That’s a key point. William H. Gass has written about the impossibility of visualizing complex descriptions, calling them—as tools for visualization—so much wasted words because we can’t actually visualize that much detail. The words of an elaborate description may serve some purpose, but heightening visual perception isn’t one of them. Carver’s descriptions here are not poetic or lyric or even particularly notable for their nouns or verbs—“scuffle” and “fisted” are the strongest—but their simplicity allows for instantaneous images, images we can visualize.
 
One final point. Carver’s set up and conclusion also round off the sense of menace. The set up is something rare in Carver—a pointer, in the form of a value judgment, of what’s to come. At the end of the first paragraph he writes: “But it was getting dark on the inside too.” That primes the pump, prepares the reader for menace. And the story’s final sentence—“In this manner, the issue was decided.”—is equally dark, more so perhaps, because now the reader is left to imagine and create their own grisly image of what happened next.
 
Menace from the master.

Twitch, Twitch, Twitch. . .

One more lesson from Raymond Carver’s Cathedral. In “Where I’m Calling From” the opening section provides an awesome example of how to establish what’s at stake. As with most Carver stories, the basic situation is established in the first few sentences:

J.P. and I are on the front porch at Frank Martin’s drying-out facility. Like the rest of us at Frank Martin’s, J.P. is first and foremost a drunk. But he’s also a chimney sweep. It’s his first time here, and he’s scared. I’ve been here once before. What’s to say? I’m back.

What’s at stake, however, is far more serious than drying-out. Carver doesn’t rush here, nor does he make it overly dramatic, instead he lets the tension build with matter-of-fact statements in the second paragraph:

We’ve only been here a couple of days. We’re not out of the woods yet. J.P. has these shakes, and every so often a nerve—maybe it isn’t a nerve, but it’s something—begins to jerk in my shoulder. Sometimes it’s at the side of my neck. When this happens, my mouth dries up. It’s an effort just to swallow then. I know something’s about to happen and I want to head it off. I want to hide from it, that’s what I want to do. Just close my eyes and let it pass by, let it take the next man.

At this point Carver does something that seems counter-intuitive, but is actually key to establishing the tone he wants. The third paragraph begins, “I saw a seizure yesterday morning,” which puts the twitches in the narrator’s shoulder and neck in a different perspective. Carver doesn’t immediately describe that seizure, however. Instead he sets the scene at the breakfast table, shows Tiny and the other men laughing and joking. What this does is humanize the characters. Carver tries to make you invest in and care for Tiny before he shows you the seizure:

Suddenly, Tiny wasn’t there any more. He’d gone over in his chair with a big clatter. He was on his back on the floor with his eyes closed and his heels drumming the linoleum.

In the fourth paragraph, Carver then describes Tiny’s subdued demeanor on his return, thus completing the contrast between his pre- and post-seizure behavior. That sets up the final paragraph of this first section, where Carver lets the narrator reveal his real concern about his twitches:

I’d like to ask him if he had any signal just before it happened. I’d like to know if he felt his ticker skip a beat, or else begin to race. Did his eyelid twitch? But I’m not about to say anything. He doesn’t look like he’s hot to talk about it, anyway. But what happened to Tiny is something I won’t ever forget. Old Tiny lying flat on the floor, kicking his heels. So every time this little flitter starts up anywhere, I draw some breath and wait to find myself on my back, looking up, somebody’s fingers in my mouth.

This opening section is a set piece that pays close study. I call it a set piece because the rest of the story is not about additional seizures or even the narrator’s worries about his twitches. There’s one mention of his shakes and one mention that Tiny is still not himself and worrying about another seizure, but that’s it. This opening section seems clearly designed to show that the narrator’s drinking had been so extreme that he’s on the verge of dying from a seizure at any moment, even while laughing and joking over breakfast. He’s quit drinking, but is still at risk. So this set piece shows what’s at stake for the narrator, that his drying-out is occurring not a moment too soon—and perhaps not soon enough. That it truly is a matter of life and death. The stakes established in this set piece then become the backdrop for what the narrator reveals in the rest of the story. The other thing this set piece does—and this is important to the story’s overall theme—it gets you listening, just as the narrator is listening to J.P.

Carver’s in the House

Okay, I know Raymond Carver is out of favor, one of those minimalists. Or, as one of my former writing teachers put it, “Thank god that crap has run its course.” Today’s subject, however, Exhibit A, if you will, is “Chef’s House” from Cathedral. (Again, this story is not available online, but, out of favor or not, if you aim to write powerful short stories, you simply have to read Carver.) This story was originally published in The New Yorker. Unbelievable! Based on recent issues I can’t imagine a story such as “Chef’s House” getting published there now.
 
Read “Chef’s house” and tell me it doesn’t break your heart. How does Carver do that with the simplest of prose? Until you can answer that question you have no business dismissing this story in favor of maximalist fiction.
 
What is the core sentiment of “Chef’s House”? It’s that Edna and Wes know that moving out of the house means the end of his recovery and their reconciliation. Read the story again and show me where it says that. Bet you thought either Wes or Edna said those exact words, didn’t you? They don’t. But that feeling is unmistakable isn’t it? So how did Carver do it using that minimal prose style?
 
I’d venture that the first chink in our armor comes—as with so many of Carver’s stories—in the opening paragraph:

He said, We’ll start over. I said, If I come up there, I want you to do something for me. Name it, Wes said. I said, I want you to try and be the Wes I used to know. The old Wes. The Wes I married. Wes began to cry, but I took it as a sign of his good intentions. So I said, All right, I’ll come up.

And this really is the key to so much of Carver’s fiction—his poems, too, for that matter—the expression of what is sought, and what has been lost, is not clouded by the fog of literary language. No impressionistic, metaphoric language here. I want you to try and be the Wes I used to know. Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. Bullshit.
 
So after that first paragraph we know what’s at stake, and what Edna and Wes are going to try to do at Chef’s house. Carver doesn’t waste any time before letting us know how things are going:

I found myself wishing the summer wouldn’t end. I knew better, but after a month of being with Wes in Chef’s house, I put my wedding ring back on. I hadn’t worn the ring in two years. Not since the night Wes was drunk and threw his ring into a peach orchard.

That is from the third paragraph. Now Edna’s expectations are rising, which is further shown in the next paragraph that summarizes the carefree days they spend fishing. And then Chef comes to tell Wes that they have to move out of the house. Here Carver lingers over the details, giving us the whole visual of Chef putting his arm around Wes as he gives him the bad news. Why linger here? So that we feel the weight, the ominous overtones—the sense that even Chef knows this is bad, that he feels the need to justify his actions by saying, “she’s my own blood.”
 
Over the next three pages Edna and Wes discuss the “knuckleball” that Chef threw them. Mostly this conversation reflects the fatalism that descends on Wes. Something he feels right away:

. . . this has been a happy house up to now, he said.
   We’ll get another house, I said.
   Not like this one, Wes said. It wouldn’t be the same, anyway. This house has been good for us. This house has good memories in it.

The subtext is clear and echoes Edna’s request in the first paragraph and her description of the summer: He has been like the old Wes, and this house isn’t associated with the bad Wes as the other houses they lived in must have been. Edna describes succumbing to Wes’s fatalism: “I caught myself talking like it was something that had happened in the past,” she says. Then their kids come into the conversation, the kids who “kept their distance:”

Wes said he wished he could do it over again and do it right this time.
   They love you, I said.
   No, they don’t, he said.
   I said, Someday they’ll understand things.
   Maybe, Wes said. But it won’t matter then.

I’ll make the same point as I did about the first paragraph: In these words are the raw emotions unclouded by literary language. Here, even subtext is jettisoned. He fucked up. His kids don’t love him. And if they ever understand, it will be too late to matter. He wished he could do it over and better. It’s that kind of plain-spoken honesty that touches us, no? Honesty that so much of literature buries behind word-pictures. As if emotions aren’t real unless they are presented metaphorically. What is that? It can’t be art if it’s naked?
 
Their conversation continues and Edna tries to break down Wes’s fatalism:

I’m glad we had this time together, Wes said.
   Then I said something. I said, Suppose, just suppose, nothing had ever happened. Suppose this was for the first time. Just suppose. It doesn’t hurt to suppose. Say none of the other had ever happened. You know what I mean? I said.

Again, a straight forward plea to forget the past and start over. But Wes can’t rise to that challenge. And here Carver abandons the plain talk and instead reveals Wes’s twisted logic of identity:

He said, Then I suppose we’d have to be somebody else if that was the case. Somebody we’re not. I don’t have that kind of supposing left in me. We were born who we are. Don’t you see what I’m saying?
   I said I hadn’t thrown away a good thing and come six hundred miles to hear him talk like this.
   He said, I’m sorry, but I can’t talk like somebody I’m not. I’m not somebody else. If I was somebody else, I sure as hell wouldn’t be here. If I was somebody else, I wouldn’t be me. But I’m who I am. Don’t you see?

Those are virtually his last words on the subject; he’s given up. And isn’t this the height of reader involvement? Don’t you want to say, “Come on, buddy, it’s only a house. You can continue what you started somewhere else for christ’s sake.” Isn’t his giving up the real heartbreaker? Carver supports that notion by immediately giving Edna a memory of Wes at nineteen. (Here Carver is being literary; the memory is a device for readers to interpret based on context—which we easily do.) Edna makes one more attempt to weaken Wes’s fatalism, but realizes it’s futile. And then with a final literary nod, Carver closes symbolically:

Wes got up and pulled the drapes and the ocean was gone just like that. I went to start supper. We still had some fish in the icebox. There wasn’t much else. We’ll clean it up tonight, I thought, and that will be the end of it.

As with the rest of the story, this symbolism is straight forward and easy to read. I’d argue that its very simplicity is its power. How many final paragraphs have you read that strung together a series of complex images, using beautiful, soaring poetic language, but that required a Ph.D. in literature or psychology, and perhaps both, to interpret? A lot I’d bet. Sure, you appreciated the language, the writer’s cleverness in finding the figures to represent the function. But did those endings affect you—as a person—as much as Wes closing those drapes did?
 
It takes courage to write as Carver did. To just close those drapes. To let that action stand for what it is without dressing it up in literary language. As he said, no tricks. That’s where Carver’s power to move us comes from.

Seeing With His Eyes Closed

Having already cracked Raymond Carver’s Cathedral last week to look at “Vitamins” I thought it would be useful to look at the frequently praised title story. The ending of “Cathedral” has received much critical attention, for example, here’s Kirk Nesset from his The Stories of Raymond Carver: A Critical Study:

. . . this man finds not escape or evasion by finally discovering in self-enclosure, a discovery made possible by his willingness to delve into that inner vestibule of self, where selfishness gives way at last to self-awareness. A man obsessed with the faculty of vision. . . he clings now to a miraculous glimpse of a world beyond insular life, remaining willingly blind to the distracting reality of his former world, even as Robert calls him back, “It was like nothing else in my life up to now,” he says, staggered by new awareness, adding, in the story’s final sentence, “It’s really something.” The indefiniteness of his language—he is usually more glib than he seems here—expresses both the sheer incomprehensibility of his revelation and the fact that he registers it as such. He falls into “depths of feeling that he need not name of justify,” as one critic writes, feeling of an intensity unmatched anywhere else in Carver’s fiction [68-69].

The marker for this intense character change is when the narrator, with the help of the blind man, draws the cathedral. But what did Carver do earlier in the story so that this remarkable scene could achieve its transcendence? The general answer is that, more so than in any of his other stories, Carver allows the narrator, in page after page of a long buildup, to reveal his thoughts and his feelings. This is one story where we don’t have to guess at the change. Right from the first paragraph we see his negative attitude:

I wasn’t enthusiastic about his visit. He was no one I knew. And his being blind bothered me. My idea of blindness came from the movies. In the movies, the blind moved slowly and never laughed. Sometimes they were led by seeing-eye dogs. A blind man in my house was not something I looked forward to.

Over the next few pages he recounts the history of his wife’s relationship with the blind man, and does so in language that is hard to describe in any other way than disparaging, before he concludes, “Now this same blind man was coming to sleep in my house.” To further underscore his isolation and his insensitivity, Carver then provides this exchange:

“Maybe I could take him bowling,” I said to my wife. She was at the draining board doing scalloped potatoes. She put down the knife she was using and turned around.
   “If you love me,” she said, “you can do this for me. If you don’t love me, okay. But if you had a friend, any friend, and the friend came to visit, I’d make him feel comfortable.” She wiped her hands with the dish towel.
   “I don’t have any blind friends,” I said.
   “You don’t have any friends,” she said. “Period. Besides,” she said, “goddamn it, his wife’s just died! Don’t you understand that? The man’s lost his wife!”
   I didn’t answer. She’d told me a little about the blind man’s wife. Her name was Beulah. Beulah! That’s a name for a colored woman.
   “Was his wife a negro?” I asked.
   “Are you crazy?” my wife said. “Have you just flipped or something?” She picked up a potato. I saw it hit the floor, then roll under the stove. “What’s wrong with you?” she said. “Are you drunk?”
   “I’m just asking,” I said.

So at this point, a mere third of the way into the story, the transcendent ending Carver eventually delivers can hardly be imagined. But I think this exchange between the narrator and his wife is key to why the surprise ending works so well. The wife’s reaction is also the reader’s reaction, is it not? Don’t we want this guy to get a clue? Of course, Carver doesn’t let that happen right away, instead he has the narrator continue his insensitive commentary after the blind man arrives, and he keeps it up until very near the end.
 
The other thing to note about the story’s ending is that it doesn’t come about because of some change within the narrator. First, he’s stoned—and some critics have supposed that the transcendent moment would fade away along with the narrator’s high. Secondly, the cathedral drawing is initiated by the blind man. The narrator is pushed to participate in the experience, and even as he starts to draw, his first judgment on the activity is, “Crazy.” The transcendent moment comes only as his last resistance crumbles. Rather than building toward the ending, Carver has moved the story continually away from the ending. The narrator doesn’t desire the change at the end. It’s not something he’s been pursuing during the story. It is, however, a change that his wife and the blind man—and the readers—hunger for, and thus the ending comes as a relief. The real blind man in the story has been made to see.

"Nelson nothing"

I was reading Raymond Carver’s story “Vitamins” again last night—it’s not available online, but you can read it in Cathedral—and it occurred to me that he doesn’t get a lot of credit for the way he manipulates tension in his stories. Here’s one example. The narrator, who is trying to put the moves on his wife’s best friend, is sharing a nightclub booth with two guys he’d rather not. One of the guys—Nelson—has just gotten back from the war in Vietnam and he’s brought his own bottle of whiskey into the club:

”You real good friends with him, I bet,” Nelson said to Donna.
   “We’re good friends,” Donna said.
   Hannah came over. Benny Asked for RCs. Hannah went away, and Nelson worked a pint of whiskey from his topcoat.
   “Good Friends,” Nelson said. “Real good friends.” He unscrewed the cap on his whiskey.
   “Watch it, Nelson,” Benny said. “Keep that out of sight. Nelson just off the plane from Nam,” Benny said.
   Nelson raised the bottle and drank some of his whiskey. He screwed the cap back on, laid the bottle of whiskey on the table, and put his hat down on top of it. “Real good friends,” he said.

Notice how Nelson’s repeated comment keeps raising the ante. The repetition also signals that he’s not going to let this one go. His wheels are turning. You know this situation is going to get worse before it gets better.

We were bunched in the booth, glasses in front of us, Nelson’s hat on the table. “You,” Nelson said to me. “You with somebody else, ain’t you? This beautiful woman, she ain’t your wife. I know that. But you real good friends with this woman. Ain’t I right?”
   I had some of my drink. I couldn’t taste the whiskey. I couldn’t taste anything. I said, “Is all that shit about Vietnam true we see on TV?”
   Nelson had his red eyes fixed on me. He said, “What I want to say is, do you know where your wife is? I bet she’s out with some dude and she be seizing his nipples for him and pulling his pud for him while you setting here big as life with you good friend. I bet she have a good friend, too.”
   “Nelson,” Benny said.
   “Nelson nothing,” Nelson said.

Carver takes it up a few notches from there, but I’ll leave the rest for you to read on your own. Carver got beat up—still does—for his sparse prose, however, in scenes like this that sparseness pays big dividends. The menace jumps off the page in a way it wouldn’t if this scene were adorned with descriptive detail. The other reason this style works here is the menacing tone of the dialogue. These guys aren’t just chit-chatting over a drink. So that, at the end of the quoted passage, the simple lines “Nelson,” “Nelson nothing” conjure up all the tension. Do you really need Carver to describe the looks on their faces, or their body language, or what the narrator is thinking and feeling at that point? Doesn’t it now reside within you? That type of affective writing is much harder to achieve than it looks. Part of the secret is learning that sometimes too many words dull the effect.

Sowing Suspicion

A strong undercurrent in Carver’s “Are These Actual Miles?" is the question of just what did Toni have to do to get that car sold? Carver never divulges, never says that she slept with the car salesman, yet isn’t that what we think happened? We draw that conclusion because of the clues Carver places in the story. Here’s the first one, from the opening scene:

“I’ll have to have dinner or something, I told you that already, that’s the way they work, I know them. But don’t worry, I’ll get out of it,” she says. “I can handle it.”

“Jesus,” Leo says, “did you have to say that.”

Right there the possibility is in play and Leo knows it. We know it too because of Leo’s reply. It's a simple comment, but loaded, words that convey consequences. The next clue is when Leo remembers his own infidelity. While that says nothing about what Toni will do, it does put infidelity in the reader’s mind. The next clue is when Toni calls Leo after being gone for six hours:

“I wanted to call,” she says.

“Where are you?” he says. He hears piano music, and his heart moves.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Someplace. We’re having a drink, then we’re going sonmeplace for dinner. I’m with the sales manager. He’s crude, but he’s all right. He bought the car. I have to go now. I was on my way to the ladies and saw the phone.

She’s out with the sales manager and is being evasive. Carver ups the ante further with Toni’s next call:

“Honey,” Leo says.

“What?” she says.

“Please, honey,” Leo says.

“He said he sympathizes,” she says. “But he would have said anything.” She laughs again. “He said personally he’d rather be classified a robber or a rapist than a bankrupt. He’s nice enough, though,” she says.

“Come home,” Leo says. “Take a cab and come home.”

“I can’t she says. “I told you, we’re halfway through dinner.”

“I’ll come for you,” he says.

“No,” she says. “I said we’re just finishing. I told you, it’s part of the deal. They’re out for all they can get. But don’t worry, we’re about to leave. I’ll be home in a little while.” She hangs up.

In a few minutes he calls New Jimmy’s. A man answers. “New Jimmy’s has closed for the evening.” The man says.

Here Leo is pleading, but Toni remains insistent. When Leo calls the restaurant and it's closed, what else is he to think? Toni finally comes home near dawn, they argue, and after Toni passes out, Leo checks for evidence:

He turns on the lights, looks at her, and begins to take her clothes off. He pulls and pushes her from side to side undressing her. She says something in her sleep and moves her hand. He takes off her underpants, looks at them closely under the light, and throws them into a corner.

But we aren’t told whether Leo found what he was looking for as Carver holds us in suspense while he delivers one more clue as the salesman returns:

He looks through the front curtain and sees the convertible in the drive, it’s motor running smoothly, the headlamps burning, and he closes and opens his eyes. He sees a tall man come around in front of the car and up to the porch. The man lays something on the porch and starts back to the car. He wears a white linen suit.

Leo turns on the porch light and opens the door cautiously. He makeup pouch lies on the top step. The man looks at Leo across the front of the car, and then gets back inside and releases the handbrake.

“Wait!” Leo calls and starts down the steps. The man brakes the car as Leo walks in front of the lights. The car creaks against the brake. Leo tries to pull the two pieces of his shirt together, tries to bunch it all into his trousers.

“What is it you want?” the man says. “Look,” the man says, “I have to go. No offense. I buy and sell cars, right? The lady left her makeup. She’s a fine lady, very refined. What is it?”

What is it? is right, but we might ask instead, what happened? Leo doesn’t know, we don’t know, but we all have our suspicions because of the clues Carver has carefully sown throughout the story.

Values of a Witness

One of my favorite techniques among the many Raymond Carver uses in “Are These Actual Miles?” is his use of a minor character, Ernest Williams, as a witness. Williams first shows up in the opening scene where he observes Leo saying goodbye to Toni when she heads off to sell the convertible. Here’s how Carver brings Williams into the story:

Ernest Williams looks from across the street. In his Bermuda shorts, stomach hanging, he looks at Leo and Toni as he directs a spray onto his begonias. Once, last winter, during the holidays, when Toni and the kids were visiting his mother’s, Leo brought a woman home. Nine o’clock the next morning, a cold foggy Saturday, Leo walked the woman to the car, surprised Ernest Williams on the sidewalk with a newspaper in his hand. Fog drifted, Ernest Williams stared, then slapped the paper against his leg, hard.

Leo recalls that slap, hunches his shoulders, says, “You have someplace in mind first?”

So Williams is not just a witness to this moment of shame—he’s seen other such moments. As Leo and Toni talk, Williams becomes more judge than witness:

Ernest Williams turns the hose in their direction. He stares at them through the spray of water. Leo has an urge to cry out a confession.

Leo can’t escape his guilt because Williams is spraying it in his face. As the scene ends, Williams makes a final value judgment:

”Things are going to be different!” he calls to her as she reaches the driveway. “We start over Monday. I mean it.

Ernest Williams looks at them and turns his head and spits. She gets into the car and lights a cigarette.

“This time next week!” Leo calls again. “Ancient history!”

Williams also returns briefly at the end of the story, when Leo is talking to the car salesman:

The light in Ernest Williams’ bedroom goes on. The shade rolls up.

Witness once again. And here the reader can make the value judgment from that slightest bit of detail. What makes this one sentence so effective is that it calls back to those three appearances in the first scene. No need to spend more exposition on Williams here because we remember how he acted at the beginning and how that made Leo feel. I think Carver rightly keeps that bit of exposition sparse. Keep in mind that this one sentence works because of what came earlier. The sentence would be weightless if it was just an isolated detail (then it would be minimalism).

This minor character as witness/judge is particularly effective in a story such as this where the main character—although on an emotional rollercoaster—is essentially not making value judgments about himself. Williams the witness sees Leo and, by implication, says, I know who you are. Which hits home to Leo, just as Toni’s shouted “Bankrupt” hits home. In this way the value judgments Leo isn’t able to place on himself (or that, narratively, Carver didn’t want to allow the character to make) can still be interpreted by the reader.

Is This the Actual Title?

As with several other Carver stories “Are These Actual Miles?” was originally published with a different title. In the collection Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? the story is titled “What Is It?” This change in titles points to Carver’s never ending revision process, which led him to find a better title when he republished the story in Where I’m Calling From, and the change also demonstrates how a great title adds meaning.

Of course I can only say “Miles” is a better title because Carver found it. “What Is It?” might only seem weak by comparison. Interestingly, both titles are fragments of dialogue from the same scene, and thus reflect on Carver’s intuition that it is in that scene where the story’s heart can be found. Here’s the fragment that produced the first title:

“Wait!” Leo calls and starts down the steps. The man brakes the car as Leo walks in front of the lights. The car creaks against the brake. Leo tries to pull the two pieces of his shirt together, tries to bunch it all into his trousers.

“What is it you want?” the man says. “Look,” the man says, “I have to go. No offense. I buy and sell cars, right? The lady left her makeup. She’s a fine lady, very refined. What is it?”

Clearly Leo’s sense of humiliation, desperation, and helplessness are the focus here—an answer perhaps to the question the title poses. Carver’s way of saying this is what the story’s about.

Now, here’s the fragment that produced the second title:

”Well, goodnight,” the man says and coughs. “Take it easy, hear? Monday, that’s right. Okay, then.” He takes his foot off the brake, put it on again after he has rolled back two or three feet. “Hey, one question. Between friends, are these actual miles?” The man waits, then clears his throat. “Okay, look, it doesn’t matter either way,” the man says. “I have to go. Take it easy.” He backs into the street, pulls away quickly, and turns the corner without stopping.

The query about the miles adds insult to injury, but the purpose of choosing this as the title is not to focus on that additional wound (liar), it’s to draw attention to what all those miles put on the car mean. The genius of changing the title to “Are These Actual Miles?” can be seen in the way it connects two passages in the story and unifies them into a metaphor for Leo and Toni’s marriage. The first passage comes amid the description of how they overspent themselves into bankruptcy:

What else did they have? This and that, nothing mainly, stuff that wore out and fell to pieces long ago. But there were some big parties back there, some fine travel. To Reno and Tahoe, at eighty with the top down and the radio playing.

Those miles put on the car representing the good times now gone. The second passage is in the story’s final paragraph:

He turns on his side and puts his hand on her hip. He runs his fingers over her hip and feels the stretch marks there. They are like roads, and he traces them in her flesh. He runs his fingers back and forth, first one, then another. They run everywhere in her flesh, dozens, perhaps hundreds of them. He remembers waking up the morning after they bought the car, seeing it, there in the drive, in the sun, gleaming.

Where a different sort of miles is figured—the miles a person has traveled and the marks they leave, the wear and tear.

Other passages in the story resonate with the “Miles” title, but I’ve gone a wee bit lit crit here, so I’ll leave it to you to trace them further. The takeaway is that titles are also an element of craft. A title probably can’t hurt a story too much—unless it’s completely off-base and misleading—but a great title can itself be part of the story’s meaning, and like a tuning fork, a great title can also provide the pitch to which the rest of the story chimes.

Carver Kraftwerke

This week I’ll be spending time with Raymond Carver’s story “Are These Actual Miles?” The story’s not available online so I’ll break one of my site rules and write about it anyway because if you’re writing short stories and haven’t spent time in Carver’s world you really need to buy a book or two. “Are These Actual Miles?” is perhaps my favorite Carver story, and in the next several bloggings I’ll show—from a craft perspective—why I like the story so much. First though I want to add my .02 on the minimalism label Carver’s been tagged with because “Miles” is a great example of a Carver story that is short, with minimal scenes, and yet resists the minimalism critique.

To get a good understanding of the distinction, compare “Miles” with “Why Don’t You Dance?,” which is another of my favorite Carver stories, but one that I think is less resistant to the minimalism label. In “Why Don’t You Dance?” there is a scene built around the stunning visual of a bedroom suite set up in the driveway. Here’s how that scene is set as the story begins:

In the kitchen, he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard. The mattress was stripped and the candy-stripped sheets lay beside two pillows on the chiffonier. Except for that, things looked the way they had in the bedroom—nightstand and reading lamp on his side of the bed, nightstand and reading lamp on her side.

His side, her side.

He considered this as he sipped his whiskey.

The description continues on from there to describe in some detail how the rest of the furniture—all of the furniture from the house—is arranged outside in the front yard and driveway. We never find out why the furniture is outside; the story closes with that secret intact. The furniture being outside is left to work metaphorically and much lit crit analysis has and will continue to be spent on what that furniture stands for. The minimalist label gets sticky here because Carver could have provided more information without telling all, but chose not to. The phrase “he considered this” with the contents of that considering never being divulged is at the core of the minimalist attack. The interpretative work is left entirely up to the readers. (But how important is knowing what he’s considering? What would that get us? One example where such considering is divulged can be found in Richard Ford’s novella “The Womanizer,” in his collection Women with Men, where the introspection is so exhaustive it becomes claustrophobic. I’m not convinced, however, that we learn a heck of a lot more from those pages and pages of introspection.)

Personally, I love the starkness of “Why Don’t You Dance?” I love the not knowing why, and I love the way this scene creates its emotional response by virtue of its minimalist techniques. “Are These Actual Miles?” on the other hand, while not telling all, does put the plight right to us. In “Dance” the furniture is on the lawn but we don’t know why. In “Miles,” however, we know that the car has to be sold because Leo and Toni are going bankrupt. Here’s how the story begins:

Fact is the car needs to be sold in a hurry, and Leo sends Toni out to do it. Toni is smart and has personality. She used to sell children’s encyclopedias door to door. She signed him up, even though he didn’t have kids. Afterward, Leo asked for a date, and the date led to this. This deal has to be cash, and it has to be done tonight. Tomorrow somebody they owe might slap a lien on the car. Monday they’ll be in court, home free—but word on them went out yesterday, when their lawyer mailed the letters of intention. The hearing on Monday is nothing to worry about, the lawyer has said. They’ll be asked some questions, and they’ll sign some papers, and that’s it. But sell the convertible, he said—today, tonight. They can hold onto the little car, Leo’s car, no problem. But they go into court with that big convertible, the court will take it, and that’s that.

Here the life coming undone is not presented metaphorically, it is an in your face reality. Further on we are shown what the car meant to Leo and Toni:

It’s her car, they call it her car, and that makes it all the worse. They bought it new that summer three years ago. She wanted something to do after the kids started school, so she went back to selling. He was working six days a week in the fiber-glass plant. For a while they didn’t know how to spend the money. They put a thousand on the convertible and doubled and tripled the payments until in a year they had it paid….

And after the car is sold, we see just how tightly wrapped their emotions are:

Near dawn he hears footsteps on the porch. He gets up from the couch. The set hums, the screen glows. He opens the door. She bumps the wall coming in. She grins. Her face is puffy, as if she’s been sleeping under sedation. She works her lips, ducks heavily and sways as he cocks his fist.

“Go ahead,” she says thickly. She stands there swaying. Then she makes a noise and lunges, catches his shirt, tears it down the front. “Bankrupt!” she screams. She twists loose, grabs and tears his undershirt at the neck. “You son of a bitch,” she says clawing.

He squeezes her wrists, then lets go, steps back, looking for something heavy. She stumbles as she heads for the bedroom. “Bankrupt,” she mutters. He hears her fall on the bed and groan.

The language is tight, the setting is sparse, and the scenes are few, but the depth of this portrait is anything but minimal.

More Carver as the week goes on, so if you haven’t read (in a while, or ever) “Are These Actual Miles?” and “Why Don’t You Dance?” find a copy of Where I’m Calling From and dig in, because I might do a few others stories of his while I’m at it.

Killer Carver Hooks

I’ve been reading Carver again this week and was struck by the simple power within so many of his stories’ first sentences. Here’s the best of the first sentence hooks:

“Are These Actual Miles?”

Fact is the car needs to be sold in a hurry, and Leo sends Tony out to do it.

“Why Don’t You Dance?”

In the kitchen, he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard.

“Viewfinder”

A man without hands came to the door to sell me a photograph of my house.

“Gazebo”

That morning she pours Teacher’s over my belly and licks it off.

“The Third Thing That Killed my Father Off”

I’ll tell you what did my father in.

“Kindling”

It was the middle of August and Myers was between lives.

“Careful”

After a lot of talking—what his wife, Inez, called assessment—Lloyd moved out of the house and into his own place.

“Where I’m Calling From”

J.P. and I are on the front porch at Frank Martin’s drying-out facility.

“The Train” (Be sure to check out Cheever's "The Five-Forty-Eight" to see where Miss Dent came from.)

The woman was called Miss Dent, and earlier that evening she’d held a gun on a man.

“Intimacy”

I have some business out west anyway, so I stop off in this little town where my former wife lives.

“Menudo”

I can’t sleep, but when I’m sure my wife Vicky is asleep, I get up and look through our bedroom window, across the street, at Oliver and Amanda’s house.

“Elephant”

I knew it was a mistake to let my brother have the money.

What separates these first sentences from others is the way they clearly announce a story and hint at trouble, trouble had or trouble coming. That’s a tough formula to ignore.