Gabriel Congdon's Reviews > Short Cuts: Selected Stories

I found these stories unsettling.


As to prose: Carver takes the whole Hemmingway thing farther than I’ve seen it taken afore. There’s is no ornamentation. There’s not one pretty line. This isn’t a dejection, in fact with what I’ll say later it seems apt. But regardless, beauty is not for here. Beauty in this world would seem out of place, and at worse, chintzy kitsch.

Now I know that the 70’s were a dark time in American history, so the fact that is book came out in 80 or 81, it would seem to fit the proscript. We can all dust off our hands and say, “Good job, Carver.” But still, something remains. It almost seems that the darkness here has less to do with the 70’s than it has to do with the figure of Raymond Carver.

I don’t know shit about Carver besides that he probably liked his booze. But this is one of those “reading into” sitch’s wherein I summon doubts as to how bad the world the was VS. Carver himself that feels like a somewhat disturbed individual. It calls to mind Zola’s definition of a piece of art as a corner of the world distorted by the artist’s temperament. This fits Carver like a pair of assless chaps. That’s the mystery of these sad, dark stories: was the world this bad or was Carver bad with the world?

The writers that followed held Carver as a deity. People like Baxter and Chaon and, well, I’m not going to parade a litany of names. Regardless, they were able to take what worked from the corner of the world without lapsing into the fury and sadness that is thee writer, Raymond Carver.