help me understand raymond carver

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i dont get it, it seems forced and dull and obvious and fake and with too many choppy short sentences. Whats the deal with carver?

― anthony easton (anthony), Wednesday, 18 September 2002 13:17 (twenty-three years ago)

i read 'what we talk about when we talk about love' and i didn't get into it at all. i mean, it was ok, but didn't really grab me...

― gareth (gareth), Wednesday, 18 September 2002 13:19 (twenty-three years ago)

It's not dull, it's matt.

― Tim (Tim), Wednesday, 18 September 2002 13:28 (twenty-three years ago)

Raymond Chandler is better.

― Colin Meeder (Mert), Wednesday, 18 September 2002 14:04 (twenty-three years ago)

'that's it, buddy! now you're cooking with gas.'

― Josh (Josh), Wednesday, 18 September 2002 14:32 (twenty-three years ago)

Antony, I've never got Carver on the page either, but anytime I've heard his stuff read or dramatised I've been spellbound. I'm the wrong kind of reader for Carver, I think: I don't dwell enough to let the matt-ness accumulate into quiet intensity. Could you get someone with an understated but well-developed feel for drama and pacing read the stories to you? (Could I?)

― Ellie (Ellie), Wednesday, 18 September 2002 15:23 (twenty-three years ago)

'h'
(Sorry Anthony).

― Ellie (Ellie), Wednesday, 18 September 2002 15:24 (twenty-three years ago)

I know Ellie is right, even though I have never read any Carver.

Other authors who work best aloud?

― N. (nickdastoor), Wednesday, 18 September 2002 15:53 (twenty-three years ago)

The one about the hippies in the bingo hall ("After the Denim"?) is just perfect, though a lot of what I enjoy in Raymond Carver has to do with local color (he really gets the tension in the interactions between the hippies, fucked up suburbians, divorcees, and drunks that live in Northern California places like Mendocino and Humboldt...he makes their individual struggles for power so pathetic-seeming, which I guess can be off-putting but I quite enjoy it.)

― Kris (aqueduct), Wednesday, 18 September 2002 15:55 (twenty-three years ago)

It's like this woodsy, post-60's form of passive-aggression.

― Kris (aqueduct), Wednesday, 18 September 2002 16:20 (twenty-three years ago)

Anthony, have you been reading them one after the other in quick sucession? I think you have to leave them to soak in, or perhaps to dry, seeing as they are matt. I haven't read them for a long time, but they never struck me as forced, I liked them a lot.

― PJ Miller (PJ Miller), Wednesday, 18 September 2002 16:35 (twenty-three years ago)

I love Carver. Do you love any of what has been labelled Dirty Realism, Anthony? I have seen people suggest, rather pointlessly, that these deserve the term "Postmodernism" better than Barth/elme, Gaddis, Gass, Coover, etc., and I'm completely unpersuaded, but there is a conscious lack of meaning that makes me wonder if a firm Modernist such as yourself might dislike that. On the other hand, it's not long since I was pulling this on The Pinefox, and I don't want to be the ILXer who keeps saying "You wouldn't get it, you're a Modernist" to everyone, so I'll shut up.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Wednesday, 18 September 2002 17:56 (twenty-three years ago)

dirty realism, hmm like whom ? i love carole shields if she counts, i dont know-give me names. also i have been thinking about them and maybe they should settle.

― anthony easton (anthony), Wednesday, 18 September 2002 18:38 (twenty-three years ago)

Richard Ford is the second best known exponent (The Sportswriter is wonderful - and Independence Day sold loads to people who thought it was a tie-in with the SF movie!). Also Frederik Barthelme, a relative of Donald though I can't remember how exactly, Jayne Anne Phillips, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff, Richard Russo. I wonder if it's a British-defined genre? Two issues of the influential literary mag/book/periodical Granta (8, 19) foregrounded these writers. Nonetheless, they do have a fair amount in common, in their subject matter, surface, style and substance, I think. I like most of them.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Wednesday, 18 September 2002 18:49 (twenty-three years ago)

two years pass...

I'm reading "Where I'm Calling From" right now and I'm not sure what to think. OTOH, if I forced myself to write more, this is exactly the type of writing I would aspire to, on the other hand, as a reader, this tickles me nicely but does not blow my mind. I guess I'm just not into the short story format.

What does "matt" mean?

― The Emancipation of Baaderonixx (KERERU 4 LIFE!) (Fabfunk), Wednesday, 8 June 2005 09:02 (twenty-one years ago)

'Matt' (or 'matte') is the opposite of glossy.

I love raymond Carver. he leaves enough space.

― Archel (Archel), Wednesday, 8 June 2005 10:01 (twenty-one years ago)

a friend - a writer inspired very much by carver - bought me "where i'm calling from" for christmas. i still haven't started reading it. this is bad of me, i know. especially given that for the past couple of weeks i've been re-reading the hitch-hiker's guide omnibus.

sometimes i can be a bit crap.

― grimly fiendish (grimlord), Wednesday, 8 June 2005 10:11 (twenty-one years ago)

oh god how i LOVE Raymond Carver.

― jed_ (jed), Wednesday, 8 June 2005 10:55 (twenty-one years ago)

Me too. I think he is my favourite writer and I never usually have favourite anythings.

― estela (estela), Wednesday, 8 June 2005 11:09 (twenty-one years ago)

Did he write longer novels?

― The Emancipation of Baaderonixx (KERERU 4 LIFE!) (Fabfunk), Wednesday, 8 June 2005 11:40 (twenty-one years ago)

Nope, lots of poems though.

― Archel (Archel), Wednesday, 8 June 2005 11:43 (twenty-one years ago)

What estela said.

― Gravel Puzzleworth (Gregory Henry), Wednesday, 8 June 2005 13:28 (twenty-one years ago)

The thing with WICF is that 'cos they're unfinished you sorta realise reading them what a magnificent, rich thing a finished Carver story is, when you notice with a jolt something that isn't quite yet an allegory of itself... (also that first story in it, the husband and wife!)

― Gravel Puzzleworth (Gregory Henry), Wednesday, 8 June 2005 13:32 (twenty-one years ago)

I don't really see Martin's "conscious lack of meaning" though! When Carver does that rush towards the light at the end, that reminds me of what Barthelme and even DFW do a whole lot, it seems to have much more in common with them than they do with say Pynchon, in a way?

― Gravel Puzzleworth (Gregory Henry), Wednesday, 8 June 2005 13:36 (twenty-one years ago)

'Feathers' is my favourite story that there is.

― Gravel Puzzleworth (Gregory Henry), Wednesday, 8 June 2005 13:36 (twenty-one years ago)

WICF isn't unfinished - do you mean "Call If You Need Me"?

xpost - it doesn't seem to have anything in common with Barthelme or Pynchon as far as i can see.

― jed_ (jed), Wednesday, 8 June 2005 13:39 (twenty-one years ago)

i meant Donald Barthelme - maybe you meant the other one.

― jed_ (jed), Wednesday, 8 June 2005 13:41 (twenty-one years ago)

I'll take Barthelme over Carver anyway, and Barthelme-followers over Carver-followers (like F Barthelme!) by a really long shot, but I do have a good bit of admiration for Carver. The prose isn't flat at all, I don't think, just Carver-y stylized, in a way that works something like the flatness of "hardboiled" prose (or big Carver-fan Murakami); I don't agree with tagging it as a form of "minimalism," because there's a pretty expressive element to all that bafflement and concentration and understatement. Carver's also one of few people for whom the Carver-type / New-Yorker-type ending usually works, and seems to actually carry something rather than just tying into an opaque shape.

NB I miss Ellie P! I really liked Ellie P. I even liked how she kind of seemed to hate me.

― nabiscothingy, Wednesday, 8 June 2005 15:11 (twenty-one years ago)

I like reading Raymond Carver stories. There was a long stretch of time there in my twenties where I drank gin every day and read his books. I'm beyond that now, and I haven't picked up any of his books lately. Perhaps I'm beyond him too, but I like to think that maybe I'm just letting his words soak in a bit longer than I'm used to.

― Pleasant Plains /// (Pleasant Plains ///), Wednesday, 8 June 2005 15:58 (twenty-one years ago)

(A bit of real-name googling suggests that Ellie P is too busy being a fancy-pantsed respected academic to deal with the likes of us. Onward and upward, ILX!)

― nabiscothingy, Wednesday, 8 June 2005 15:59 (twenty-one years ago)

I did mean Call If You Need Me :( I am an idiot.

― Gravel Puzzleworth (Gregory Henry), Wednesday, 8 June 2005 16:02 (twenty-one years ago)

he is a genius

― Yakuza Ghost Six (nordicskilla), Wednesday, 8 June 2005 16:08 (twenty-one years ago)

Jed I did mean DB, yeah. I guess what I was trying to say about the endings was that both C's and B's tend to read as optimistic to me by returning things to a known, safe, small thing... I can see how this wouldn't be true, or be kinda obvious-yet-meaningless, to other people.

x-post Yes!

― Gravel Puzzleworth (Gregory Henry), Wednesday, 8 June 2005 16:12 (twenty-one years ago)

this thread has a better title:

Raymond Carver is a loser

― scott seward (scott seward), Wednesday, 8 June 2005 16:28 (twenty-one years ago)

Gregory, I wouldn't want to recommend paying any great attention to what I say about Carver (or anything else) but the bit you reference was me acknowledging that while I don't think it's very rewarding to try to call Carver a PostModernist, he does have some things in common with people like (D) Barthelme, as you say, and that might mean that some people who don't care for all that might find him unsatisfying, frustrating.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Wednesday, 8 June 2005 16:57 (twenty-one years ago)

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